I think my YouTube account has been blacklisted somehow as a lot of the comments I post those days are deleted or shadow deleted within a few minutes (and not just on EEVBlog, although correct me if you are deleting them). I suspect it's because I write my comments in MS Word and then copy paste them into YouTube, the magical all seeing YouTube AI probably thinks I'm a bot because of that, but serves me right for wanting English (AU) spell checking instead of YouTube's English (US).
I spent way too long writing this comment so I'm not about to waste it so here it is:
For me, an ADSL internet connection and 2 GB (later 20 GB and 200 GB) of bandwidth was enough to allow me to see the crazy STEAM things people put on the internet in 240p back then which is a massive reason why I took the path I did, today all this is vastly more accessible and there’s a lot more of it, so the job is already half done compared to STEAM several years ago.
However, as for putting things in the education curriculum that’s extremely difficult, our modern western education system is design to mass produce a population with an ‘acceptable level of standardised education’, as a result most activities in the classroom have to be assessable in some way to award a grade at the end of it in order to filter out students for tertiary education acceptance. If given the option kids are smart enough to realize they should avoid anything complex, difficult or new because they have a high chance of failure, however going into a new complexly unknown field especially when young and self-guided is almost guaranteed to result in a catastrophic failure and thus bad grade.
Another problem is if a kid choses to take a completely different direction to the rest of the class to say, obtain better data through a better more complex methodology, the teacher has to put in the effort to understand and check how it’s better, if you encourage that in a class of 30 students it is infeasible to check every students work so most will just be marked wrong for deviating from the assignment that has been the same for the past 5 years, even if their data is vastly better. I talk from experience in doing an assignment in high school with the question “determine which battery brand lasts the longest in a torch”, I changed the question to “design a circuit to automatically measure a battery’s capacity in Wh, and determine which battery has the highest Wh per dollar”, however I made that choice knowing I would be given a bad mark and I was, partly because the teacher didn’t understand what I was doing, but mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing, but the most important part was I meant a lot about complex topics (like MCU programming) that were never taught at that school, looking back now at my data I can see I was mostly correct and got feasible data, but I clearly didn’t understand everything I was trying to do and didn’t have the tools to do what I wanted to do which I think is fair to expect of someone in high school doing a self-guided project.
For me encouraging extra-curricular things is most important, not even the best teacher comes close to having the knowledge of every niche field out there that a student might be interested in, but the internet comes very close and possibly most importantly it doesn’t hold back with “but we won’t cover that”, it will go full tilt “as you can see here the metal has been activated by the neutron source in this gamma emission spectra I acquired on this LN2 cooled high purity germanium spectrometer” and that’s what encouraged me to look further into a field even though I wouldn’t understand it properly for 6 years (and still don’t).
Background: I taught a short Introduction to Electronics to 1-2nd grade, Beginner Programming (Python) for 5-6th grade, and currently 3D Modeling and Printing for 5-6th grade. For better or worse I'm neither a qualified teacher not a qualified engineer, just a seasoned maker and a volunteer; and where I teach, the kids can choose whether to enroll to the class or not, so there's some "natural selection" to begin with.
My observations:
1. At least at such a young age, you can't really let them choose the projects they'd like to do, because (a) they lack the most basic practical knowledge, (b) they are not experienced in looking stuff up either, and (c) at this point they don't even really know their options, so they'll fall back on "robot" or "an app that [...]" or whatever the teacher hints. Even so, anything substantial they choose will be too much for them - unless you can team each and every kid with a mentor, to work on the specific skills required for his/her project. Instead, they can all learn a specific technique, and then practice it using "individual" projects which are variations on the theme.
2. Annoying and depressing as it may be, some kids simply have a natural talent for these things, and some don't*. This is not about previous exposure to STEM at home or otherwise, but about an appetite for riddles, logic, mechanics etc. In this sense (again, at the early ages I taught) I saw absolutely no difference between boys and girls.
* Of course, like any other trait, this talent for STEM is not really binary!
3. The natural talent is sometimes latent, and it appears and develops as the kid is exposed to new ideas, techniques, tools etc. So the very first thing to do, in order to get them into STEM, really is to expose them to it. They certainly aren't exposed to it in the media, or by playing with their smartphones. Most of them don't see it at home either. Again, this will definitely not make all of them into engineers, but it will help alleviate their fear of the unknown, and allow the talented ones to step forward and shine.
4. While it is impossible to advance without learning some theory, the worse thing to do is give them dry theory. I guess the same is true for most adults, too. The theory has to be incorporated into doing, into something they can see and/or touch. And this, unfortunately, is far more difficult than it sounds.
I think my YouTube account has been blacklisted somehow as a lot of the comments I post those days are deleted or shadow deleted within a few minutes (and not just on EEVBlog, although correct me if you are deleting them).
I do not delete comments. Only spam gets deleted.
... but serves me right for wanting English (AU) spell checking instead of YouTube's English (US).
I thought Spell Check was provided by the browser (Chrome/Firefox/IE etc), not by the website (YouTube). In any case, I can right-click on the comment box and choose whatever spell check language I want, right in the Youtube comments section. I'm using Chrome, but I'm pretty sure most browsers would support this.
If I think back to my time at school (i.e. before college/university), the lesson time was mainly characterized by "this is stuff you need to learn". In earlier years, just because, and in later years, because you need to pass exams. The curriculum gave little scope to encourage curiosity and the asking of questions. If there is one way to shut off interesting career paths, it is to stifle curiosity. And honestly, I don't think it needs to be STEM under consideration here, it could be anything. I would prefer STEAM to stand for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics. How can you be successful in any field, unless you bring art to it?
To be fair to my teachers, many of them gave up their lunch hours to support extra-curricular activities. In my lunch hours I got to learn about pottery, wood turning, and relativity, for example, which were not part of my normal coursework.
So in summary, I think it is important to encourage curiosity and exploration, and let students have scope to ask questions and go outside the curriculum.
I do not delete comments. Only spam gets deleted.
Thanks for clarifying that, it was rather disheartening at first seeing comments get deleted until I realised it wasn’t the channel owners but some YouTube bot.
I thought Spell Check was provided by the browser (Chrome/Firefox/IE etc), not by the website (YouTube). In any case, I can right-click on the comment box and choose whatever spell check language I want, right in the Youtube comments section. I'm using Chrome, but I'm pretty sure most browsers would support this.
Yes, most text areas are spell checked by the browser but that’s purely just a dictionary spell check, I should’ve said spelling and grammar checking along with all the keyboard shortcuts I’ve gotten used to.
Although I’m pretty sure the copy paste is only half the problem, YouTube/Google’s data mining is really disturbing to me, so I use YouTube and Google in separate Firefox containers so to YouTube it appears from my cookies as if I’ve never been on any other part of the internet, it also doesn’t help that I watch YouTube videos on one account and only switch to my WizardTim one when I want to comment. I suspect I will have to stop all that if I want my comments to actually work.
If I think back to my time at school (i.e. before college/university), the lesson time was mainly characterized by "this is stuff you need to learn". In earlier years, just because, and in later years, because you need to pass exams. The curriculum gave little scope to encourage curiosity and the asking of questions. If there is one way to shut off interesting career paths, it is to stifle curiosity. And honestly, I don't think it needs to be STEM under consideration here, it could be anything. I would prefer STEAM to stand for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics. How can you be successful in any field, unless you bring art to it?
To be fair to my teachers, many of them gave up their lunch hours to support extra-curricular activities. In my lunch hours I got to learn about pottery, wood turning, and relativity, for example, which were not part of my normal coursework.
So in summary, I think it is important to encourage curiosity and exploration, and let students have scope to ask questions and go outside the curriculum.
If US is anything like here, a huge percentage of K-8 is art already, not really sure why we would need to focus more on that. Not to mention arts and performing arts are already some of the most liked classes as it is (I hated them in general, other than the computer based arts). Pottery and wood turning is cool, but not exactly a transferrable or directly useful skill for the vast majority of the population.
You can be successful in many fields without additional art curriculum. It does not fit with STEM at all.
IMHO one of the thoughest parts of getting kids (and young adults) interested in STEM nowadays is finding a project which is on one hand relevant and on the other hand is doable.
To give an example: One of my sons likes racing games. Now one of the attributes that is hard to find cheap is a hand brake. Together with one of his friends they have build two using schematics (mostly an Arduino) & building instructions for the metal work somewhere from internet. My son likes these kind of projects but just doesn't have many of them. The days of building a radio from a few transistors and a battery are definitely over. Nowadays you'd likely take a Raspberry Pi and use some kind of browser based application to receive a radio station over internet. But you can buy that off-the-shelve for less than the cost of the parts on Aliexpress.
Pottery and wood turning is cool, but not exactly a transferrable or directly useful skill for the vast majority of the population.
That is perhaps the point. Is school supposed to be about learning useful skills, or is it about being educated? There is more or less no job you can go into where school gives you the skills for that job. In every case you are going to learn the skills you need as part of on-the-job training.
You can be successful in many fields without additional art curriculum. It does not fit with STEM at all.
Consider "art" as the root of artful, rather than the root of artistic. That changes everything.
For one thing, mathematics is one of the letters in STEM, and mathematics is almost entirely an art. It is not a science.
STEAM vs STEM? While I think good engineering is an art form, and that many of the same traits that make good artists also make good engineers, I also doubt that art education is helpful in the STEM world.
You either have it or you don't. My theory is that the ART educators felt left out and to make them happy they added art to the STEM curriculum. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of art exposure and activities in school, I just don't think they really belong in STEM.
That is perhaps the point. Is school supposed to be about learning useful skills, or is it about being educated? There is more or less no job you can go into where school gives you the skills for that job. In every case you are going to learn the skills you need as part of on-the-job training.
Its about being educated with relevant/useful/transferrable skills. While also learning how to learn.
You could "learn how to learn" using less useful or commonly applied skills, but, that seems non-optimal. Could be wrong though.