STEAM in the classroom with IGNITE Serious Play

To begin, we must define what exactly it is STEM, This is an English acronym for four academic disciplines, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. But when these are interspersed with artistic and creative skills, another term arises called STEAM, where A refers to Art, including innovation and design.

The educational projects that are developed under this term aim to develop knowledge of all these subjects from a joint and interdisciplinary point, where contexts and problems are presented that must be developed and solved through all these disciplines.

STEAM aims to offer an artistic and creative perspective to scientific and technological content, to efficiently develop all knowledge and have greater abilities to solve different problems.

This type of practical education offers students the ability to develop all skills and helps them think differently. It allows students to analyze situations and encourage critical thinking through experimentation and teamwork.

It is not only important that students learn and acquire knowledge in all these areas, but that they do so by playing in a fun and practical way. This is how the theory is completely acquired.

Teamwork, furthermore, not only encourages them to learn to communicate, but also to share all points of view, this significantly increases new ideas in solving problems.

The educational focus has grown in recent years thanks to the DIY (Do It Yourself) culture. DIY provides the ability to do things for ourselves, and in our case we apply it to the new technologies. STEAM education includes this idea.

At Ignite Serious Play we are very clear that these types of methodologies are the future, and that new technologies are increasingly in our lives. For that reason, we offer three main extracurricular activities that encourage all STEAM disciplines.

• Robotics
• 3D digital manufacturing
• e-Sport programming

This extracurricular activity offers students to learn robotics, forces, movement, balance and mechanics through gears, axles, levers, pulleys, etc.

To encourage teamwork, small groups are held in each session where each student is assigned a role, engineer, builder or programmer. In each session these are exchanged, promoting different perspectives and acquiring all the knowledge.

The Robotics extracurricular is another extracurricular where we can mix technological and artistic components. Where, why not? We can do choreography dancing with drones!

This extracurricular activity offers students an introduction to 3D computer design, working as a team through the roles of designer and engineer, which change in each session.

Students will learn to reflect and understand knowledge of physics, geometry and 3D prototyping to increase and consolidate spatial vision and the proportions between the real and virtual environment. Students will carry out Smart City projects consolidating the processes of research, sketching, urban planning, 3D CAD design and printing.

It is the technology that adapts perfectly to the artistic field of STEAM, since the technology involved is 3D printing, fusing this with the concepts of design, creativity and strategic imagination.

This extracurricular activity offers students graphic tools to make programs, together they work as a team through defined tasks and roles that change each session (programmer and tester).

Students learn to organize algorithms to develop computational thinking with sequences or conditional loops and putting it into practice on hardware elements and open world environments such as sandbox Minecraft Education. At the eSports II level they will also learn to develop applications for mobile devices with App Inventor.

Through the extracurricular eSports Programming, through the Minecraft tool we can convey cultural content such as the pyramids of Egypt, gardens of Babylon, etc. through the conception of new spaces and digital communication.

At IGNITE Serious Play we transform the classroom into a transformative experience where students are motivated to learn and combine the traditional logic of work in a virtual and international community.

We provoke meaningful learning, which comes from the excitement of the students themselves when they have tools to create and communicate.

All the activities we carry out have as vehicular language English y They work collaboratively with students from other European schools.

All our teachers fulfill a double profile: Technical experience (in software development, design or robotics) and pedagogical experience. This double profile allows the activities to be very technically powerful, but also, and very importantly, to have fun.

Study is not measured by the number of pages read in one night, nor by the number of books read in a semester. Studying is not an act of consuming ideas, but of creating and recreating them. (Paulo Freire)