What is STEM?

Have you heard of STEM? It stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (or Maths as we call it), and it’s a huge buzz word at the moment.

(And if you add in Art, it becomes STEAM – read more about STEAM or (STEM + Art) here.)

There’s a huge focus on STEM around the world at the moment. Individually these subjects are all very important, but when considered as a group, they encourage the development of critical thinking, which is such an awesome skill for kids to learn. It’s about much more than learning facts and figures. Instead it’s about presenting challenges and helping kids come up with their own solutions.

STEM for girls in particular is a huge topic. One of the goals of this blog, actually, is to demonstrate ways to make STEM fun for girls with hands-on ideas that encourage questioning and meaningful learning about our fascinating world.

So far we’ve been simplifying a lot of our learning experiences by grouping most under the science pillar of STEM. But really, many of our activities incorporate other STEM pillars too. Our upcycled catapult and our DIY balance scales are activities that incorporate both science and engineering, for example.

When I explained all of this to Jewel, her eyes lit up. You could see her mind thinking, “Wow, so there’s three whole other letters we can learn about?”

Mind blown.

Here are some of our activities, ideas and reviews that I think would neatly fall under an integrated STEM banner.