STREAM: A New Paradigm for STEM Education

Abstract

The U.S. government has launched numerous programs and campaigns to improve STEM education, and educators and researchers have sought a variety of educational methods to respond to governmental campaigns. STEAM, which integrates Arts into STEM, has become one of the distinctive interdisciplinary approaches to improve STEM education. Traditional STEM education mainly focuses on developing convergent (problem-solving) thinking skills, whereas art education emphases on divergent (creative) thinking skills. Although arts can contribute to improving STEM education, another area that can bring more convincing outcomes to STEM education is recreation. Recreational activity not only improves physical fitness but also psychological health and cognitive function. Recreational activities can change both the functional and organizational compositions of the brain, resulting in an improvement in cognitive abilities. Cognitive abilities develop skills in critical thinking, logical reasoning, and problem-solving, all of which are essential for STEM education. Despite previous studies have found that recreational activity can benefit cognitive functioning, no empirical studies have been conducted regarding the use of recreational activity as an effective method to teach complicated STEM concepts. The purpose of this study was to propose and explore “STREAMâ€, a new concept that employs unique aspects of recreation to STEM education. The researchers created a recreational activity called “Who is the cheater?†to teach “Distributed Ledger†which is one of the key concepts in Blockchain technology. The participants of the study took part in a focus group discussion after the recreational activity. Eighty-percent (N =  12) of the participants found the activity to be “helpful†or “extremely helpful†to understand the concept. The themes that were derived from the comments of the study participants are that the activity is: experiential, fun, interactive, and instructive. The findings of this study support the idea that implementing a recreational activity to teach STEM concepts can be very effective. STREAM employs unique aspects of arts and recreation to supplement STEM education. Educators integrated unique aspects of arts, such as creative thinking, into traditional STEM education, which mainly focuses on developing convergent skills. Alongside arts, recreational activity help develop cognitive functions. Such a combination can generate synergic effects in STEM education.