【Geek Time】-“极客”时间，和“科技宅”Brad一起聊神秘有趣的“黑科技”“高科技”“硬科技”。欢迎关注公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】，可以查看更多精彩内容，查看英语全文稿哦~
Welcome to Geek Time. This is Brad. How are you doing Lulu?
Hi, Brad.
So we're gonna continue on with STEM, and moving to something called STEAM, just doesn't have the same feeling.
No, all these lingos, though, stem is S-T-E-M, STEAM is with an a.
…an a.
A is for arts.
Right, the whole idea is that A is bringing arts back into STEM because people moved away from the arts in like the 80s people started moving away. The government started taking funding out of art subjects, music, and all of that, and this was accelerated even more in the 90s.
But then like STEM came about and people said, why do we keep moving away from arts? Arts are still important. We still need arts, and so they decided to put it back in.
Oh, the pitiful arts just get crammed in with S-T-E-M, honestly I'm seeing that shift in China, so we're seeing that shift like a lot of people… you do hear a lot of people saying that we really should just focus more on STEM subjects as what we would call 理科like science subjects, engineering subjects. Why are we even bothered with liberal arts subjects? They're not gonna generate any productivity which I think it's a bit… to me obviously I am in arts, I was in applied linguistics and you can…
I kind of bridged both of those, I've studied language and you know, I have degrees on language and I have degrees on engineering.
Yes, we all know you have a wide range, different disciplines, so you are basically STEAM.
At least the E
Yeah, but so this whole STEAM, I think it's just obviously like you said, it's to trying to bring it back, but this arts is not really like arts, as we would understand, like 文科. It's not history, politics, it is not this type of arts. It’s more like the design elements. For example, if you're talking about designing something even industrial design or if it's designing something with computer programs, you still want to have that the ability to make it aesthetically pleasing, you have a beautiful design, that sort of idea.
In this part, yeah, the STEAM wants people to be able to do the design process, you know, not only just do the… they want to have a whole design process where they're doing problem solving and not just doing problem solving, but focusing on like incorporating teamwork, discussion, creative thinking, all of these things because when you just focus on robotics and programming, then that kind of takes like center stage.
And they don't want just robotics and programming to be the center stage of STEM. So they want to have more of like a big thing.
And so sometimes some of the STEAM materials just completely move out the robotics aspect. You still might design something and build something to fulfill a task, but you may do it with other materials.
The whole idea, I think it's for like a well-rounded education and learning, especially in primary or secondary education these stages. You don't want to limit students’ options.
Right
You don't want to, say, okay, you wanna do math, just do math, don't do anything arts related, or vice versa.
In the US we never really kind of had a separation between those things. When you went to high school, you did have to study art. Like you had to take art classes, you had to take math classes, you had to take math up to a certain level. So you had to take at least like I think it was 2 or 3 years of math. You had to take 2 or 3 years of science. You had to take history, but if you wanted to, you could take like Advanced Placement history.
And so you didn't have to take the basic subject. You could get college credit level.
Yeah, so that's AP, that is helping you explore your interest. If you're interested in history can do AP history. If you're interested in math, you can do AP math. That's the idea.
Yeah, we have all these subjects, but we didn't really have a bridge between them.
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