By: Sara Henning
Content Marketing Coordinator

What do you think of when you hear the word Art or Design? Maybe you think of the end, user experience. What do think of when you hear the word Technology or Engineering? Maybe you think of the ways to advance the lives of people within a community. As you think of these words separately, challenge yourself to think of them together. Today, you’re going to discover a new perspective on combining the education of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Design, and Math (STEAM). After all, what is a piece of technology without the user experience? All of the above programs NEED to be taught together in order to progress individual communities and our overall society.
Integrating these programs together, instead of separately, will allow our youth to think more creatively and better impact our communities. It will be the children that have grown up with STEAM who will advance further in their respective fields as adults. These children will become industry leaders that have a better understanding of the world. This is what will lead the U.S to be more innovative and able to solve more technological and economic problems.

What are some ways in which these programs can be integrated together? In today’s world, educational organizations and nonprofits, such as Project H, are pushing the boundaries of what education means and blurring the lines between art, design, science, technology, engineering and math. Project H is an educational program developed for kids, K-12. It uses the power of creativity, design, and hands-on building to amplify the raw brilliance of youth, to transform communities, and improve K-12 public education. Project H programs teach design, applied arts, sciences, engineering, and building skills to give young people the creative, technical, and leadership tools necessary to make positive, long-lasting changes within their communities. Learning is becoming more and more interactive, and is about providing opportunities for real-life, hands-on experience.

For example, when Emily Pilloton founded Project H in 2008, she believed deeply in the power of hands-on and real world applications to excite the learning experience. She has now successfully brought that belief into real life with real world applications. Emily herself has a background in architecture and building which allowed her to geek out about everything, from math and structural engineering to ethnography and the fascinating behavior of people. As an innovative, educational leader, she noticed the need for Art and Design to be utilized in the disciplines of STEM programs. She teaches her students to use all areas of STEAM to build, create, design, and problem solve ideas to create better communities.

She is teaching STEAM ideas in many ways. One way she has done this is with the story of Bertie County, the poorest, rural America area in North Carolina. Emily teaches how the integration of STEAM disciplines can motivate students to problem solve solutions that can be taught, designed, built, and launched within the community in which the students live. When Emily decided to move to Bertie County and develop Project H, her first teacher/student project was a 2000-square-foot structure that would house the Bertie County’s local farmer’s market. Her students spent two semesters and the following summer researching, prototyping, engineering, and building the structure, as well as spearheading the launch of the local farmer’s market association in their hometown of 2000 people. View the short documentary film (2:26 minutes long) about this farmer’s market project to discover the hard work and struggles that the students overcame with dedication, education, and passion: http://projecthdesign.org/film/.

A current project in which Emily is teaching STEAM studies, is with the “tiny house project.” You may have recently seen a new reality TV series capturing this new movement. The “tiny house movement” is simply the ability to design, engineer, and construct a full functioning house that fits on a trailer. The houses can be as small as 150 square feet or potentially go up to around 400 square feet. Emily and her students saw this as an opportunity to think outside the box, capitalize on this new movement and contribute to a community’s housing challenges. The challenge with this housing project was to answer the following questions: How is housing influenced by social and economic context? How does affordable access to housing empower communities or families? How does the design of a home uplift and inspire positive change in a person’s life? With these questions in mind, her students took on the design and construction of two (identical) tiny homes, approximately 7X16 feet. One home would be donated to Opportunity Village in Eugene, Oregon, an organization that provides transitional housing and job training to the unhoused or homeless. This project is live and on-going. Check out the progress here: http://projecthdesign.org/projects/tiny-homes/

Emily is innovating the ideas of STEAM programs. Youth are learning how to implement science, technology, engineering, art, and math together to physically build a better society. This is not what you would expect from a typical art and design program is it? That is because Art and design, along with the traditional STEM programs, are evolving. Emily, has proven the outcome of what can be done when education combines disciplines. I think that all science, technology, engineering, and math educators should also think outside the box and discover innovative ways to teach STEAM disciplines inside or outside of their classrooms. Combining these disciplines with interactive, real life implications is the “new age” and progression of what education should look like. After all, investing in education is all about investing in our future, so we can keep progressing to become a better society. Organizations such as Project H are doing just that. Share the importance of teaching the arts & humanities with science, technology, engineering, and math together and help inspire our youth.

Additional Project H Resources:

Learn more about the Bertie County Project: https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_pilloton_teaching_design_for_change#t-716656
Get your Kids involved in Project H workshops or summer camps: http://projecthdesign.org/programs/

Other interesting STEAM related resources:

Listen to Bran Farren, a Technology Designer, discuss Art in Engineering in this ted talk: To create for the ages, let’s combine Art and Engineering.

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