APPROACH TO THE STEAM MODEL FOR CONSOLIDATING LEARNING PHYSICS TOPICS

In the 21st century, the need to learn science is a fact and therefore there is interest throughout the world to find strategies and methods to teach them efficiently in the school setting, both to lay the foundations of university engineering careers and sciences, as for the understanding of the environment.

The STEAM model for teaching science is one of the possible options for this need. The explanation of this model can be summarized in the combination of the disciplines that give it its name: science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics to solve a problem or carry out a project, working in collaborative teams.

This communication presents an experience of approaching the STEAM model with pre-university students of a Mexican educational institution, the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, in a one-semester course of the subject called Physics II.

The exercise consisted of three stages in which the students formed teams to carry out small projects on specific topics of the Physics class: friction force, mechanical and hydrostatic energy transformation. The objectives were two: consolidate the learning and explore the possibility of working under the STEAM model scheme.

The students were asked to form teams of between 3 and 6 people, explaining that they should work collaboratively, that is, contributing all to achieve the proposed goal.

In the first stage, students were asked to apply ingenuity to Physics, to show evidence of their learning of the friction force issue in the application of it. For the second stage the use of technology had to be added to present the topic of mechanical energy transformation and in the third stage, they had to add an art content to the subject of hydrostatics to their work.

The use of mathematics was suggested in the three stages, but the students did not approach it, in such a way that in this exercise the incorporation of 4 of the 5 disciplines of the STEAM model was achieved.

In order to evaluate this approximation exercise to the use of the STEAM model, a qualitative assessment was used in two parts: the one carried out by the teacher and the other, made by the students about themselves; in both cases, a range scale was used as evaluation instrument. The results were satisfactory, both in terms of the process and the learning and the motivational aspect.