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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.

If you have to say, what do you think STEM subjects and liberal arts?

I think that students should get a little bit of both. I really think that STEM is very important even if you're going to study liberal arts, just having that mindset is very important.

Because its logical thinking. All of that… it's a left right brain thing as well.

Some people they may not be good with programming. But I think with… people should always have kind of like that logical way of thinking. So even if you don't really understand the programming, when you start studying programming, you kind of have to think about a logical way of thinking.

Now if you do this, what will happen? You basically write that into the computer program if this, then this. So you have to just kind of think about things logically.

Yes, I definitely think whether you're in STEM subjects or in liberal arts, you can surely benefit by incorporating some of the other side into your daily learning. Another idea behind this whole STEM or STEAM framework is that education wants to shift away from just memorization and standard answered tests.

Yeah, like in the US most schools they still give tests, but the test will shy away from having too much multiple choice. Multiple choice exams are just usually for like when the State wants to see the level of students; and the classes, a lot of times a lot of the exams will have a little bit of multiple choice.

But a lot of times they'll have like short answer questions or long answer questions or essays or projects like in a science class, a lot of it has to do with your doing experiments.

And problem-solving task completion.

Definitely, but STEM what they want to do is kind of move away from are you getting the answer right or wrong? Did you successfully solve the problem? But they want young people to take ownership of their problem-solving process. But then… and so they go through the process, and as long as they can show, this is the process, this is why I did this in the process. That is what the grade is really coming from.

Because let's face it, the problem solving or like you said, taking ownership of the problem solving process is what's gonna really aid them in their future career, in their future life, essentially.

I mean when you look at people who are studying for their PHD they're going out and they're doing research, and whether or not their research yields the results that they wanted to, it's still about the process.

I did my research and I found out that my hypothesis was wrong and the information says that this is not true. And you still get credit for that.

Yeah, it's still meaningful.

And towards the end of today's discussion, I would like to talk about gender like the gender issue in STEM subjects or in STEM fields in general. I think for most of the culture and for the past few decades or even going further back, women always seem to be a little bit underrepresented in STEM’s subjects.

Especially in STEM. Yeah.

Yeah. But why do you think is that, I mean there are many theories behind it, but what's your take?

Definitely parents are part of it, you know when a child wants to study something, if it's a boy, they push them towards science field. If it's a girl, they push them more towards art fields.

And that's just a general, I think have to do with society and this is what they expect, they ask children to do, boys need to do this and girls need to do that.

Yeah, it's like they are gendering… actually I've read some book, I've been reading some articles about gendering of subjects.

Definitely

So even though I personally I love languages, I've been a lover of languages since I was a little kid, but I hate when people say that all girls are better at languages because just saying that canceling out all of my hard work is just because you are a girl, so you're good language. It's like saying boys are good at math. It's just comments like that, really, really annoy me because personally I think yes, there are some differences, but it's not too big as in to prevent one gender from excelling in specific subjects. If girls were encouraged to do more STEM subjects, they could ace it as well.

Definitely

And you see that nowadays with STEM subjects, especially like in elementary school, middle school, young girls are able to practice doing programming, something that they would never ever get a chance to outside of that.

Most people don't really have a chance to do robotics or something like that or do computer programming, because it's just not available to them.

But when we have these programs, you find that it's not just boys who are in the programs, it’s a lot of girls as well. And you start to see kind of like a 50-50 distribution of boys and girls in those programs.

And the more girls you see, the more it becomes acceptable. And nowadays when you go to university, there's a lot more women in university. The percentage is more towards women in university less men. It's not too skewed on one side, but it's slightly on the other side. But when we look at STEM fields…

Like as in career.

In careers, you're starting to see that it's becoming closer to 50-50 distribution in the STEM.

However, there's a lot more women in like health care in relation to STEM whereas more of it for engineering and computer studies, physical sciences, you'll see a lot more men in those fields.

I see. I guess it's because I was…when I was very little, I was trained as kind of a mathlete and also I was surrounded by a huge engineering community. I've seen many female engineers are brilliant. And lately, actually I, at one of the startup events, I met this group of amazing women, they have this community, they started up this amazing community in China called Ladies Who Tech. It's just for women, female career advancers who are looking to network in STEM fields. It sounds really cool and hopefully in the future we're gonna see more and more women getting empowered to go into STEM subjects. And similarly, I hope to see more men to be encouraged to go into traditionally more female specific subjects.

One of the big things they're talking about like in the US is trying to get more men into like elementary school programs because when you see like high schools and high schools, especially there is a closer to 50-50 distribution with men teaching subjects and women teaching subjects.

But you often see that men are teaching science subjects, women are teaching art subjects, they want to get that more evenly distributed out. But also you find that the education system, especially in elementary school favors women teachers and by doing this, like a lot of young boys don't want to focus on studying as much because they don't see a connection to their teacher.

Exactly. I think this is another thing about the gender disparity in education and not just elementary. I would go so far as in saying early education that’s almost entirely women which is just not right. You need a balance.

Yeah.

Yeah. Language wise, there's just so many more language teachers that are women which again I think this really calls for more of a balance.

All right, we started off talking about STEM STEAM, and we ended on a gender notes. If you have any comments on this section, actually, last time we got a comment from an engineer who's a lady, and she said as a female engineer, I really enjoyed 【Geek Time】 and whatever you want to leave in a comment section, we would love to read them. Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem.

We'll see you next time.

See you next time.

Bye.