Abstract:

STEM education is a framework for learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in a cross-curriculum and integrated content. The Japanese government has declared that it will promote STEAM education, which adds A (Art / Liberal Arts) to STEM education and promotes reforms. However, it can be challenging in Japan to introduce STEAM education, which includes cross-disciplinary and creative activities. This is because the Japanese national curriculum emphasises discipline and is based on subject learning. In this study, a STEAM workshop based on Kolodner's (2002) Learning by Design concept was designed to combine the characteristics of inquiry and creative activities. The purpose of this practical and trial research was to focus on the back-and-forth between inquiry and creative activities in Learning by Design and experimentally verify the effectiveness of the design. The participants were nine children in the 3rd grade (1 person), 4th grade (2 students), 5th grade (5 students), and 6th grade (1 person) in elementary school with the consent of their guardians. The workshop was conducted by seven people: one facilitator and six student staff members. The facilitator considered Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction based on the ARCS model (Keller, 2010) to improve participants' learning motivation. An introduction (10 minutes), development (40 minutes), and conclusion (10 minutes) constituted the STEAM workshop with the workshop theme "Let's create a new school chime". The nine children were divided into three groups in the introduction part, and two student staff members were assigned to each group. The facilitator supervised the overall flow of the workshop while checking on the progress of the three groups. In the development part, inquiring and creating sounds for STEAM's Science, Technology, and Arts facilitated the workshop to move back and forth between inquiry and creative activities. The students participated in the exploration activity in which they independently recorded familiar sounds using a recorder, and they searched for copyright-free sounds from Internet sites using a tablet device. They also participated in an activity to create chimes using the collected sounds. For more interested students, exploring activities were designed to be carried out according to the participant's progress. Participants engaged in inquiry and creative activities such as inquiring about the conductivity of fruits and aluminium cans, using conductive paint, and making original musical instruments. At the conclusion, each group presented the chimes they created and shared the results of their activities. The analysis of the student's dialogues showed that the participants were exchanging multiple opinions, and ideas were divergent. It became clear that the divergence of ideas led to more creative activities. On the other hand, there were instances where the student's ideas continued to diverge, making it difficult to bring the activities together. From this, it became clear that there are advantages and disadvantages to having a high degree of flexibility in activities. I was also able to observe how research activities and creative activities went back and forth.

Keywords:

STEAM education, Instructional Design, Workshop.