STEM, STEAM and Technical Skills Deficits

There is much discussion on STEM and STEAM education, and there are many companies actively using the "aura" surrounding STEM and STEAM as buzzwords to market a whole variety of educational and "edutainment" products. Also much of the emphasis seems to be on "attractive computer devices" marketed with the promise of turning young people into (I exaggerate a bit here) "genius level engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs". A few years ago I was asked to give a talk at a workshop organised at Oxford University's Department of Continuing Education covering the topics of the RaspberryPi and 3D Printing. In my talk I made the point that "behind every great man there is a great woman" [ ... and acknowledging the converse relationship also ]. In the case of the RaspberryPi the "great man" I had in mind was Eben Upton, and the great woman was Liz Upton. I think that the great success of the RaspberryPi and the RaspberryPi foundation owes a great to Liz's social, networking and organisational skills. There is also the "Cambridge Science Park" effect to take into account. Having taught several moderately advanced courses at Broadcomm's research centre (alas no more) the raw talent available was a joy to experience. [If you are curious one of the courses I taught was OpenGL ES programming for Android, and the other was Real Time Embedded Programming using ThreadX]. Broadcomm, amongst other things manufactures a range of chips used in mobile telephones and mobile telephony systems. As part of this kind of business it is necessary to produce evaluation boards and kits that can be used by customers for prototyping and design purposes. Given also the fact that ARM is a Cambridge Company and the RISC OS is an interesting operating system developed in Cambridge and the various research projects on distributed operating systems at Cambridge University it is apparent that Cambridge hosted a large "pool of talent". Without the social networking and communication skills of someone like Liz Upton the RaspberryPi would never have become the success it is.

Embedded Linux systems are complex systems and mastering them to the point of being able to run "inspirational classes and courses" for young people, and to generate a great deal of general social interest requires a special set of skills, which, most definitely include the use of social networking and media technologies.

"A few amusing examples does not a 'silver bullet' make" when it comes to developing skills that will need to be widely mastered to be successful in the new "internet of things, AI and robotics" world that is "upon us". The US and the UK are both wealthy countries and invest quite heavily in education. They are also "class ridden" societies with huge gaps between rich and poor. This may have a bearing on the relatively low rankings both countries achieved in research published in the paper "OECD Skills Outlook 2013: First Results from the Survey of Adult Skills" in which both countries scored below average. As a commentary in the following article, https://sites.psu.edu/gto1/tag/steam/, put it (in the case of the US here ... but, much the same could be said about the UK)

“Despite having a higher rate of educational attainment than any previous generation, U.S. students 16-34 years of age ranked lower than most of their international peers in literacy, mathematics and technology problem solving. Those born in the U.S. after 1980 tied for last among the 22 participating countries in numeracy and technology skills, and 16th in literacy. Top scoring Americans in this cohort ranked lower than their peers in most other countries, and bottom-scoring Americans ranked among the lowest in the whole study.”

This was a warning bell, which, it must be said, is still ringing out loudly at the present time.

A very apt quote attributed to Thomas Piketty, that I came across in this article, https://www.ets.org/s/research/30079/introduction.html, issues the following warning/observation ... "Historically, the main equalizing force — both between and within countries — has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills. However, this virtuous process cannot work properly without inclusive educational institutions and continuous investment in skills. This is a major challenge for all countries in the century underway." [Eduardo Porter, “Q&A: Thomas Piketty on the Wealth Divide,” The New York Times, March 11, 2014, https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/qa-thomas-piketty-on-the-wealth-divide/.]

It is my concern with these issues, and especially how they relate to STEM and STEAM teaching that have prompted this article. I shall be coming back to it and editing it as my thinking and understanding develops. It is meant as somewhere to collect together thoughts and suggestions, both mine, and those (hopefully) contributed by others in the ensuing discussion. For STEM and STEAM to be successful the social and societal aspects are as important as the "pedagogical aspects". Progress often depends on "sharing ideas" and on "serendipity".

For me computers are tools. Originally so expensive and slow, but now so powerful and comparatively extremely cheap they will alter the way we teach and learn. This has not yet happened as most STEM and STEAM subjects are still taught in "relatively rigidly" channeled curricula and still with (too) much emphasis on memory, rote learning "teaching to the exam" and "performance tables". In the following paragraphs I hope to come up with ideas and suggestions about how teaching curricula might be adapted to incorporate computers and digital systems.

A simple example based on the teaching of A Level Chemistry (K11 to K12 roughly) in the UK illustrates the kinds of approaches I have in mind. Topics that many students find difficult, if not downright boring, are those involving Hess' Law calculations, calculations involving equilibrium constants and calculations involving electrode potentials. Using an approach that incororates computer science it is possible to develop "structured exercises" that involve the retrieval and structuring of information. For instance creation of databases with tables containing information about things such as "heats of combustion", "ionisation potentials", "heats of solution" and "solvation". [Note: In the case of "solvation" the following answer (given as answer in an actual chemistry exam) will not pass : "Solvation is about solving things rather as salvation is about being saved"]. Having created such databases it should be possible to write suitable queries to extract the relevant parameters, and then to write computer programs (e.g. in Python) to calculate series of values for various compounds and then to plot the outputs graphically (e.g. using Python's Matplotlib). When teaching chemistry at this level the important point is to be able to make sense of trends and patterns. From the point of view of future "inventors and discoverers", and at a more advanced level, this can lead on to "chemometrics", for example as a suitable subject for further study and investigation.

Later on I/you will provide examples from Physics and Biology, and, in the case of ART examples linking together e.g. NLP (Natural Language Processing), links between literature and psychology, the taking of drugs and the creative processes and the "interactive arts".

Moving on ... I have a hunch that STEM and STEAM should include coverage of the Semantic web. The Semantic web is evolving and is important in querying for and searching for information. Programming the Semantic web is quite complex and constructing Ontologies is not particularly easy. However it is very important. Time will tell to what extent XML will be replaced or supplemented with JSON-LD ... However there are a number of very powerful ontologies out there ... e.g. OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology), Gene Ontology (GO), RXNO (an ontology of named chemical reations developed originally by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

Somewhere, more advanced, students should be introduced to SPARQL - an ontology query language. A particularly well designed ontology is the BBC Ontology, https://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/bbc, which "codifies the logic that connects web documents, BBC products and platforms for which content is available " and is very relevant to working with the 'A' in STEAM.

Interesting ontologies in the BBC ontology universe include

• Food Ontology - https://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/fo
• Core Concepts Ontology - https://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/coreconcepts
• Politics Ontology - https://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/politics

Possibly a way of getting started with the Semantic Web is with Concept Maps / Concept Diagrams and then moving on to Ontologies proper and RDF (Resource Description Framework). The famous Pizza Ontology tutorial is also an excellent teaching resource for Semantic Web novices - [https://mowl-power.cs.man.ac.uk/protegeowltutorial/resources/ProtegeOWLTutorialP4_v1_3.pdf]

Semantic technologies have a very important role to play in the flexible retrieval and analysis of information and data. The following paper, "How Semantic Technologies can Enhance Data Access at Siemens Energy" is probably too advanced an approach for school level STEAM / STEM teaching, but, illustrates the possibilities of what can be done https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6649/paper.pdf . Adapting it to something appropriate will by no means be an easy task but, I would argue, is an important one.

The following book "The STEAM Revolution Transdisciplinary Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Humanities and Mathematics" published by Springer in 2019, https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319898179, contains a miscellany of chapters that provide a source of ideas and projects, albeit at an advanced academic level. They need to be adapted and developed into useful STEM/STEAM projects or modules.