STEM: Academic Silos or Exciting Fusion?
From Richard C. Larson
 STEM  Science, Technology, Engineering AND Math.
STEM ≠ Science, Technology, Engineering OR Math.
What’s my point with these two relationships, the 1st an equation or equivalence and the 2nd an inequality? It has to do with academic “silos” or “stovepipes.” STEM education needs to lift the student out of the silo mentality, where she thinks, “this class is math,” “this one is biology”, and this one focuses on “engineering design.” STEM education needs to cut across silos, showing the evolving and exciting integration now developing among formerly disparate academic disciplines.
Biology provides a wonderful example. Some of the current breakthroughs in biology involve inter-silo collaboration with math, and/or computer science, and/or physics, and/or chemistry. The new results are not biology’s alone, but belong to a fusion of fields. An example is in an upcoming BLOSSOMS video, “Why Don’t Falling Raindrops Kill Flying Mosquitoes?” In this video lesson for high school students, Professor David Hu of Georgia Tech shows super-slow-motion films of flying mosquitoes being hit be falling raindrops. And he categorizes the hits as “glancing blows” and “direct hits.” The films show what happens to the mosquitoes in each case. Prof. Hu then argues how some simple laws of Newtonian mechanics, together with the resilient properties of the mosquitoes’ 200-million-year-evolved exoskeleton, solve the mystery. The two silos here are biology and physics. Their integration was necessary to solve the problem. By the way, Prof. Hu’s academic appointment at Georgia Tech is a joint one – in two departments, Biology and Mechanical Engineering. This is a true inter-silo appointment and one that reflects the growing mixture of traditional disciplines.
Especially in math, students often complain about lack of applications. Many do not see the relevance of math to their own lives. But presenting to them instances of math as applied to other silos can significantly change student attitudes. In the BLOSSOMS collection, we even have one representing not STEM but STEAM, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math: “Arabesque: Where Art Meets Mathematics,” by Dr. Jawad Abuhlail (King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). Most of the pictures selected for this lesson are visible on the walls of Al-Hambra – Granada (Spain), which is one of the most important landmarks in the Islamic civilization. There are three educational goals for the lesson:
- establishing the concept of isometries;
- giving real-life examples of groups;
- demonstrating the importance of matrices and their applications.
Who knew that math can be so tied up to art? That art depended on mathematics?
A major challenge going forward is this: How do we train STEM or STEAM teachers to be cross-disciplinary? How do we change teacher education programs to reflect the growing interdependence across silos? Maybe we save this discussion for a later STEM Pals!
Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is also the Director of MIT LINC and the Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS.
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