Abstract:

Students who have little experience in the STEAM scientific-technical areas, have, in general, the perception that any problem is a complex problem, beyond their cognitive capabilities. In addition, these students often lack any personal affinity and motivation to address a problem that they already consider complex. This is a psychological barrier that has historically limited the academic success of STEAM projects in the classroom.

In this paper, we present a set of programming environments to overcome these barriers. We call these programming environments computational ecosystems.

Each ecosystem is implemented with a separate and customized version of the Snap programming environment (https://snap.berkeley.edu/). It contains the set of programming blocks that are necessary for the creation and development of all student activities. This personalized version of Snap has the direct benefit of identifying for the students those computational elements that are relevant to the project.

The areas selected for the elaboration of these ecosystems include those identified in the literature as of special personal interest of the students: Music, Sports, Artistic Expression, Dance, Games, Humanities, and others that will be derived from the consultation of the interests of the students, including new areas of Computational STEAM curriculum such as discrete calculus, differential vector geometry, probabilistic computation, deterministic and probabilistic cybernetics.

Keywords:

STEM, STEAM, Computational ecosystems.