Why put the "A" in "STEAM" Learning?

Lots of educators and learning communities are talking about STEAM education. You may be asking, why include an arts perspective in STEM learning?

Starfire STEAM programming (STEM+Arts) links the creative arts to science, technology, engineering and math to give students the tools they need to the innovators, educators, leaders, and learners of the 21st century! 

By integrating art with STEM, Starfire gives students the creative spark to harness the capabilities of STEM skills. Our students fuse an in-depth knowledge of STEM with a focus on arts to creatively integrate and apply that knowledge to solve real world problems. 

Starfire teachers share their passion for the creative arts with our students. Art and creativity infuse Starfire’s enrichment classes, Fun with STEAM virtual labs and MathTastic Help sessions.

Starfire STEAM students take thoughtful risks, engage in experiential learning, persist in problem-solving, embrace collaboration, and work through creative processes. Students learn more and they retain more of what they learn. 

Find out more about what STEAM education can do for your child by checking out our current courses or getting in touch with the Starfire support team!

STEAM Challenge - Dinner Table Cube Math

Starfire knows every kid can excel at math! Math that happens within the family, the community, and everyday life supports kids to strengthen their math awareness, understanding and confidence. 

Kids can engage in vibrant and plentiful math learning opportunities, even around the dinner table! Check out the awesome challenge we've shared below!  We suggest enjoying them as a family.

We’re sharing a fun math challenge called “Cube Conversations” to promote math talk around the table from Steve Wyborney, an Oregon based math teacher.

Take a look at these increasingly challenging Cube Conversation images and ask:

• How many cubes?

• How do you know?

• What do you see?

• How else can you see it?

Starfire teachers share fun and collaborative math challenges that let kids know that they can excel in math and have fun! 

Speed vs Depth in STEAM Learning

Starfire teachers encourage depth, creativity and fluency in STEAM learning. We know that every student can be a “math person” or “science person” with the right encouragement and support!

Many students incorrectly believe that being good at STEAM learning means being fast. In our classes, we dissociate success from speed.

When we value fast computation over other skills, we discourage deep thinking, risk taking and meaningful progress. Starfire teachers teach students to think deeply, connect methods, reason, and justify their methods. 

Winter Session Updates

We are thrilled to be touching base with our Starfire community at the mid-point of Winter Session 2019. We are excited to be collaborating on critical thinking skill development, deep learning, and fun with our Starfire students.  

Class News
The Starfire curriculum emphasizes exploration and hands-on-learning over memorization.  This generates useful context for students that is helpful in learning and retaining new skills.  

Here are som fun examples of activities and challenges happening in Starfire classrooms:

• Luyi’s Art & Design class at La Entrada worked to turn 2D shapes into 3D forms.  The students created masks out of their newly formed 3D shapes.

• Tejal’s Electrical Engineering class at Brewer Island learned the concept of insulators vs. conductors and how those concepts apply to real world engineering scenarios.

• Jennifer’s Math class at Escondido completed a highly interactive workshop estimating the number of gems in a glass and the length of a string. Students were asked to explain/defend their reasoning and encouraged to risk conjectures.

Teacher Spotlight
We are proud of the enthusiastic, credentialed and dedicated teachers at Starfire.  We would love to share some information about one of the newest members of our team, Samina. Our Starfire Education instructor Samina started her career as a software engineer, working at places like Cisco and Oracle doing software development. More recently, she has focused on being a Technical Trainer and coding Instructor in a variety of settings. Samina is also community minded! She is involved in the training department of Women in Big Data.

She is also a mom to two teenage boys who share her love of reading, computers and museums. She has enjoyed mentoring her boys and wants to share that enjoyment with Starfire Education students.

Starfire Learning Tools
Design Thinking is one of the pedagogical tools our students use to solve problems.  The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize and glean insights. Design thinking is a strategy for solving problems through creativity, and innovation. Starfire teachers help students apply the skills used by designers to solve problems posed in their classrooms, whether they are posed in math, coding or engineering classes.  Design thinking as a problem solving method was developed at Stanford, and is a growing feature of STEM education. We love the research coming out of REDLab at Stanford University Graduate School of Education and its focus on the use of Design Thinking in K-12 Education.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/redlab/cgi-bin/publications_resources.php

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