Dr Raffaella Demichelis is an ARC Future Fellow at Curtin University, where she develops virtual models to study geochemical and material science problems. She enjoys running outreach activities aimed at engaging kids and the general public with science.
A few years ago, the State Government of Western Australia asked me to develop a workshop about teaching mathematics through dance. I was so curious (what do mathematics and dance have in common?) that I accepted the offer with no hesitation. After being involved with CSIRO’s Scientists and Mathematicians in Schools network and other science outreach initiatives, I thought I had enough experience to accept the challenge.
I did some research. I attended meetings with a working group composed of two teachers, one facilitator from the WA Government, and the director of Ausdance WA. My role was to find some mathematical concept that could be taught through movement, so I decided that symmetry would do the job. And it did. The workshop was a success in schools, with around 30 teachers exploring new ways of introducing complex mathematical concepts through the art of dancing. We all had fun, and we all learnt something.
This is how I got into the world of STEAM education: learning science, technology, engineering and mathematics through the arts.
After time spent juggling family and work, as well as doing my outreach activities on a volunteer basis, I had to leave the STEAM world behind for a while. I did not revisit it again until this year, when I discovered the true power of engaging with STEAM activities at home.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, I developed 50+ STEAM activities (about one per day of lockdown) with my three year old daughter, and shared them through my blog. We called our project ‘The House of Fun’—because we really did have fun. The idea was to develop resources to support families with young children during the lockdown. Soon, we realised we had built a house with no walls and no boundaries, during a time full of walls and boundaries.
We shared our blog through social media, reaching out to colleagues, families at our day-care, and our friends and families all over the world. We learnt that many families with young children were experiencing the same difficulties we were, and we are glad that they found a good source of inspiration in our blog.
Through our activities, we learnt how to count and classify objects by making jewels from pasta. We learnt about the water cycle by crafting a snowflake with Q-tips. We made our own rainbow in a dark room with a mirror and a glass of water, and then drew and crafted rainbows with a variety of techniques. We learnt and created a lot of other things. With the dual purpose of promoting sustainability and keeping costs low, we developed all activities with materials recycled from everyday waste such as cereal boxes, flyers, newspapers, toilet rolls and carton boxes.
These activities were not only aimed at contributing to my daughter’s education. Our STEAM activities have been a way to maintain and improve our whole family’s mental health, happiness and interpersonal connections during the lockdown. All of our activities, in fact, are designed for children and their parents/carers to work together, and offer the opportunity to practise team building and teamwork skills.
It is well established that doing creative work has a huge and positive impact on mental health. Research has shown that engaging in creative arts has an extraordinary effect on our emotional cognition, enhancing our ability to communicate and process feelings. It has also been demonstrated that engaging in repetitive movements such as colouring, knitting or sculpting with clay can have a soothing effect and help relieve stress.
Some of our STEAM activities also involved movement, like going for a walk to collect leaves to classify, and active play, like learning the principles of coding through running around the house. This also offers a fantastic opportunity to keep fit while improving the quality of the time we spend together.
The importance of STEM in the arts is largely acknowledged—think, for example, of conservation and restoration of cultural heritage. However, the importance of the arts in STEM, and of humanities and social sciences (HASS) more broadly, is often overlooked. Indeed, I have had people good-naturedly laugh at me when I mention the A in STEAM, for a variety of reasons, including the stereotyped assumption that there is no creativity in STEM. The A has been queried as a typo several times. We are often questioned as to why we would even want to include the arts in STEM education.
As a solid state chemist, I think about the fact that traditionally, every crystallography course starts with a picture of one or more of Escher’s drawings. And that’s what makes many students view the International Tables of Crystallography with less fear. They can still look pretty scary, but replacing abstract dimensionless lattice points with fish patterns helps students learn to recognise symmetry.
Having worked with big databases, I know that visualisation is often one of the most powerful ways to present data and make a point. I recall one team in my network who made sense of years of data only after analysing them through a proper visualisation facility, using particular colours and perspectives. More broadly, producing meaningful pictures and movies that sticks in the minds of the audience definitely straddles the boundary between the arts and science.
As mentioned above, HASS is already part of STEM. Every field has plenty of these examples—just think about astronomy pictures. HASS has always been part of STEM and continues to be inextricably linked. Thinking back through history, an example that comes to mind is the strong connection between botanists and botanical artists, so strong that I would define it as professionally symbiotic. Thinking to the future, I see communication and media skills becoming increasingly important in science. This includes the delicate ability to reword and restructure messages based on the targeted audience.
Furthermore, we will leave future generations with many environmental challenges to face: challenges requiring creative, new and complex solutions. STEM and the arts are both creative, and putting them together can further boost creativity. Just the kind of creativity you need to craft educational toys from materials from your recycling bin, for example.
STEAM is something that children naturally do while exploring and experiencing the world. And they usually have fun doing so. A lot of fun. So perhaps a better question is: WHY NOT? The arts can help to highlight STEM elements that people are exposed to in everyday life. They can therefore make STEM concepts more accessible and interesting to the wider community.
A more general remark regarding the perceived 'fight' between STEM and HASS: it is not a fight. They are not exclusive. We need both.
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