STEM "Education" Programs

Atharv Gupte
Feb 23, 2017
3 min read

In my junior year of high school, I enrolled in a Project Lead the Way (PLTW) engineering class on what was supposedly teaching students the principles of engineering design. Back in the day, I was thoroughly thrilled with such a class; after all, who didn't like constructing robotics and racing rover missions to mark designated spots? Additionally, I will never forget that final plane-building project in the class, where we were to try to make a self-propelled winged aircraft takeoff from the ground and stay aloft on its own power.

However, this program at its conclusion left me with mixed feelings: on the one hand, I developed practical experience working with expensive machinery, and learned how to model using AutoCad. On the other hand, the very competitive nature of such a curriculum dissuaded me from wanting to pursue engineering (I am now an economics and mathematics major).

I am beginning to worry in my school district's over-embracing of the PLTW program. In the last two years, its presence has multiplied from simply an engineering pillar to now newly constructed columns of biomedical science and computer programming. There are approximately 900 out of 3200 high school students participating in a PLTW program this year, and the number is steadily climbing. More than 1/4 of the school population is effectively yielding themselves to a land of separated competition, and a lack of creativity and interaction.

The "best-fit," or those who manage to have a robot move .0001 speed units faster than the others every time, are often lauded by their achievements, but the others are often discouraged by the sole fact that another group is slightly more capable than them. Both sides don't get a grasp on the real world of engineering and innovation: a land of creativity and finding problems to solve.

To be fair, I think STEM education programs are a great idea to keep America moving into the twenty-first century in terms of innovation and overall economic output. However, two things need to be addressed with this inflating issue:

How do you instill real creativity in students participating in such a program
Can similar programs be implemented for non-STEM members to bolster personal enlightenment?

To tackle the first question, there are two possible tracks: simply praising students for innovative ideas and inviting them to go beyond the classroom to find applications that fit to the specifications of the developed project. However, I think a second track may prove to be a viable alternative: impose a heavier writing/analysis unit in the beginning of the curriculum, and then let that analytical ability flow to a final creative design project. Students may not receive as much hands-on experience with such a system, but they may very well enlighten their ability of transferring skills to wherever their foot may take them, be it engineering or fictional literature.

From this arises the second question, on how non-STEM fanatics can receive an education tailored to their future plans. It turns out that an education system fit for these people could very well mirror that of the future engineers, and use the creativity gained to write inspiring soliloquies and memoirs, or novelly analyze a historical event.

In effect, both questions have an intersecting answer: teach students how to uniquely analyze phenomena in a field that fascinates them.

This brings me to a new Finnish system that is piloted in several of the country's high schools. In the upper grades, students are given an open-ended current event that can be analyzed or fixated using nearly any discipline imaginable. The students break out into individual duties in solving the problem, guided but not spoon-fed by their teachers. They collaborate with others, who share novel approaches in dealing with the issue at hand. Applying such a system to PLTW would definitely be welcome in both appealing to a broader set of students and allowing students to explore opportunities they may have never fathomed before.

Our world is flat, not bricked. Humanity needs to be as united as the sphere on which it resides, and such a tenet extends to how our up-and-coming should be educated. STEM enrichment programs have sought to retort against the connected reality, but they only disillusion students from what practical work implies. STEM is the future of our society, but we need to maintain links to humanity's golden past that has kept mankind alive and thriving.

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