Experience with Multi-Disciplinary Student STEAM Teams
Dan Clapper, Mary Anna LaFratta · 2015
STEAM is an initiative to add Art (A) and Design to the national agenda of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. STEAM proponents suggest that the divergent, creative features that are associated with the Arts are needed to increase integrative learning and improve creative problem solving in the STEM disciplines. This paper details experience with using multi-disciplinary STEAM student project teams of college students to develop mobile web applications for clients. Two methods were used for creating and running those teams and the positives and problems encountered for each are detailed. While the ideal approach for STEAM education might be project courses in which students from different disciplines enroll and receive course credit in their respective disciplines, this paper has shown that there could be significant administrative hurdles to overcome with that approach. The two approaches described in this paper can be used to help instructors experiment with creating STEAM teams within their existing administrative infrastructure and highlight the problems they are likely to encounter when doing so.