How Craft Professionals Apply STEM Every Day
Craft projects are far different from STEM lessons in many ways. It’s easy to see why some people choose to become craft professionals and pay little or no attention to STEM. With craft, the professional has a good idea of what the end product will look like and has step-by-step directions. However, this is not the same for STEM. The project can be messy, and the students lack step-by-step directions. The finished product is not predetermined, so there is no idea what it might look like. The students, or whoever is creating the design, must be in complete control throughout the design process.
Many people started to hear about STEM many years ago, and the initial reaction was to reject it because it felt like another buzzword in education. However, as more people started to research it and participate in professional development opportunities, the dominant thinking began to change, and they began to implement it in classrooms.
Many people, including craft professionals, started to appreciate STEM and see its value because it helps to build the growth mindset in students and professionals practicing it.
Characteristics of STEM
Here are some of the common characteristics of STEM lessons.
- It takes an engineering design process to guide STEM lessons. This allows the craft professional to define the problem, research, brainstorm, and create a prototype to test and redesign.
- It requires cooperative teamwork from all involved in the design process.
- For students, STEM lessons use science and math content which the students are learning in the classrooms.
- With STEM, it is possible to have various correct answers, and failure is seen as a part of the learning process.
Explaining What STEM is
It is easy to label STEM for what it is, but in the same way, it can also be mistaken for what it is not. According to essay help in a college paper, there are a few things that STEM is not, and the chief of those is the cookie-cutter project. Even though STEM projects may use one material, it is unlikely that all the final products are the same.
STEM is unlike traditional crafting, in which professionals follow the same procedure and create the same predetermined end product. As craft professionals start to adopt STEM methods in their design process, they learn to move away from the cookie-cutter approach (where everyone follows the same process to get the same results) to become more creative and produce unique products.
STEM creations are usually very different. It does not matter if you have a group of craft professionals working with the same materials or trying to create the same thing. Each one of them will achieve the goal while building something different from the others. This will unlock a higher level of creativity in craft making. This is something that craft professionals have realized and is why they are more open to it now than before.
Using the STEM method to create anything is usually not straightforward, not for students or even craft professionals. It might take a lot of time and constant practice to get things right, which can be frustrating. One of the biggest lessons of STEM is to never give in to failure. Failure is seen as an integral part of the road to success. With each failure, the professional is more informed about the project and how to not go about it. So they have to be creative to look for other ways to solve the problem. Sometimes it requires collaboration and strong problem-solving skills. As stated in assignment help, it takes the craft professional out of their comfort zone. This forces them to develop their growth mindset as failure is regarded as natural for a design process in STEM.
The biggest problem that craft professionals will encounter in their use of STEM is time. Materials may not be difficult to find since they are their craft and have the resources they need. However, they will have to spend more time applying STEM to their design process than traditional crafting models. Crafting takes a lot of time ordinarily, but when the craftsman uses STEM, they should expect to take even more time. This is because they are using a unique process to get an exceptional end product. Achieving something at this scale may come with a lot of failure and retrials. So, time is the biggest problem for anyone working with STEM, and this is something that craft professionals are getting to understand.
Conclusion
The apparent disadvantage of STEM for craft professionals is the additional amount of time that they will need to complete their project. However, there are more advantages. It activates critical thinking in craft professionals and helps them develop the growth mindset they require to succeed after multiple failures.
