The Support of Maker Activities in the Attraction of Students to STEAM
Wilma Huacasi, Aruquia Peixoto, Bianca Maria Rego Martins, Vania Vieira Estrela, Luiz Antonio De Saboya · 2025
To attract students to undergraduate courses is an important topic in Engineering, and this work should be developed during elementary or high school with an emphasis on the connection between the topics presented and solutions in the form of real-world problems. The emergence of the term STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) emphasizes the importance of including Arts and Design as an important relationship with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Maker activities can be used to create tangible objects and provide students with an understanding of the relationship between mathematical topics and real-world objects. Maker culture is often associated with robotics and devices with computational capabilities as a way to develop computational thinking skills for elementary and high school students. In addition, maker education can also be related to the design of these objects and can be used to make students understand how these design decisions relate to realworld issues, from the choice of material used to the scale of the object. This paper proposes to present mathematics content in elementary and high school with the support of maker education to provide students with an understanding of concepts and the connection of these topics with real-world objects. During the learning process, students develop models where they are encouraged to think about how to develop an abstract idea by creating an object in the real world, letting them understand the need to learn abstract concepts and also the decisions that result in a good project. Maker education can be used for self-study and to develop students skills, but it can also be used to provide teamwork and the integration of diverse students during the learning process.