Education, science, engineering and technology Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an umbrella term used to group together the distinct but related technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The term is typically used in the context of education policy or curriculum choices in schools. It has implications for workforce development, national security concerns (as a shortage of STEM-educated citizens can reduce effectiveness in this area) and immigration policy, with regards to admitting foreign students and tech workers. There is no universal agreement on which disciplines are included in STEM; in particular whether or not the science in STEM includes social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. In the United States, these are typically included by organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Labor's O*Net online database for job seekers, and the Department of Homeland Security. In the United Kingdom, the social sciences are categorized separately and are instead grouped together with humanities and arts to form another counterpart acronym HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences), rebranded in 2020 as SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy). Some sources also use HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) as the counterpart of STEM. History In the early 1990s, the acronym STEM was used by a variety of educators in preference to SMET, including Charles E. Vela, the founder and director of the Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education (CAHSEE). Moreover, the CAHSEE started a summer program for talented under-represented students in the Washington, D.C., area called the STEM Institute. Based on the program's recognized success and his expertise in STEM education, Charles Vela was asked to serve on numerous NSF and Congressional panels in science, mathematics and engineering education;it is through this manner that NSF was first introduced to the acronym STEM. One of the first NSF projects to use the acronym was STEMTEC, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Teacher Education Collaborative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which was founded in 1998. In 2001, at the urging of Dr. Peter Faletra, the Director of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists at the Office of Science, the acronym was adopted by Rita Colwell and other science administrators in the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Office of Science was also an early adopter of the STEM acronym Other variations (ARTS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATHEMATICS);[ MORE FOCUS AND BASED ON HUMANISM AND ARTS. •A-STEM •ESTEM (ENVIRONMENTAL STEM •GEMS (GIRLS IN ENGINEERING, MATH, AND SCIENCE); USED FOR PROGRAMS TO ENCOURAGE WOMEN TO ENTER THESE FIELDS. •MINT (MATHEMATICS, INFORMATICS, NATURAL SCIENCES, AND TECHNOLOGY) •SHTEAM •SMET (SCIENCE, HUMANITIES, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, ARTS, AND MATHEMATICS) (SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, ENGINEERING, AND TECHNOLOGY); PREVIOUS NAME •STEAM (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, ARTS, AND MATHEMATICS) • STEAM (science, technology, engineering, agriculture, and mathematics); add agriculture • STEAM (science, technology, engineering, and applied mathematics); more focus on applied mathematics •STEEM (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, ECONOMICS, AND MATHEMATICS); ADDS ECONOMICS AS A FIELD •STEMIE (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS, INVENTION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP); ADDS INVENTING AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS MEANS TO APPLY STEM TO REAL WORLD PROBLEM SOLVING AND MARKETS. •STEMM •STM (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS, AND MEDICINE) (SCIENTIFIC, TECHNICAL, AND MATHEMATICS OR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND MEDICINE) •STREAM (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ROBOTICS, ENGINEERING, ARTS, AND MATHEMATICS); ADDS ROBOTICS AND ARTS AS FIELDS Geographic distribution Australia The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority 2015 report entitled, National STEM School Education Strategy, stated that "A renewed national focus on STEM in school education is critical to ensuring that all young Australians are equipped with the necessary STEM skills and knowledge that they must need to succeed.“ Its goals were to: "Ensure all students finish school with strong foundational knowledge in STEM and related skills" "Ensure that students are inspired to take on more challenging STEM subjects" Events and programs meant to help develop STEM in Australian schools include the Victorian Model Solar Vehicle Challenge, the Maths Challenge (Australian Mathematics Trust), Go Girl Go Global and the Australian Informatics Olympiad. Canada Canada ranks 12th out of 16 peer countries in the percentage of its graduates who studied in STEM programs, with 21.2%, a number higher than the United States, but lower than France, Germany, and Austria. The peer country with the greatest proportion of STEM graduates, Finland, has over 30% of its university graduates coming from science, mathematics, computer science, and engineering programs SHAD is an annual Canadian summer enrichment program for high-achieving high school students in July. The program focuses on academic learning particularly in STEAM fields. Scouts Canada has taken similar measures to their American counterpart to promote STEM fields to youth. Their STEM program began in 2015. In 2011 Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist Seymour Schulich established the Schulich Leader Scholarships, $100 million in $60,000 scholarships for students beginning their university education in a STEM program at 20 institutions across Canada. Each year 40 Canadian students would be selected to receive the award, two at each institution, with the goal of attracting gifted youth into the STEM fields. The program also supplies STEM scholarships to five participating universities in Israel. China To promote STEM in China, the Chinese government issued a guideline in 2016 on national innovation-driven development strategy, instructing that by 2020, China should become an innovative country; by 2030, it should be at the forefront of innovative countries; and by 2050, it should become a technology innovation power. In February 2017, the Ministry of Education in China announced they would officially add STEM education to the primary school curriculum, which is the first official government recognition of STEM education. And later, in May 2018, the launching ceremony and press conference for the 2029 Action Plan for China's STEM Education was held in Beijing, China. This plan aims to allow as many students to benefit from STEM education as possible and equip all students with scientific thinking and the ability to innovate. In response to encouraging policies by the government, schools in both public and private sectors around the country have begun to carry out STEM education programs However, to effectively implement STEM curricula, full-time teachers specializing in STEM education and relevant content to be taught are needed. Currently, China lacks qualified STEM teachers, and a training system is yet to be established. Several Chinese cities have taken bold measures to add programming as a compulsory course for elementary and middle school students. This is the case of the city of Chongqing. Europe Several European projects have promoted STEM education and careers in Europe. For instance, Scientix is a European cooperation of STEM teachers, education scientists, and policymakers. The SciChallenge project used a social media contest and the studentgenerated content to increase motivation of pre- university students for STEM education and careers. The Erasmus programme project AutoSTEM used automata to introduce STEM subjects to very young children. India India is next only to China with STEM graduates per population of 1 to 52. The total fresh STEM graduates were 2.6 million in 2016. STEM graduates have been contributing to the Indian economy with well paid salaries locally and abroad since last two decades. The turnaround of Indian economy with comfortable foreign exchange reserves is mainly attributed to the skills of its STEM graduates. Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. The earliest written records of identifiable predecessors to modern science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia from around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes.After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age[ and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek manuscripts from the dying Byzantine Empire to Western Europe in the Renaissance. Science. Early history Science has no single origin. Rather, systematic methods emerged gradually over the course of tens of thousands of years,taking different forms around the world, and few details are known about the very earliest developments. Women likely played a central role in prehistoric science, as did religious rituals. Some scholars use the term "protoscience" to label activities in the past that resemble modern science in some but not all features; however, this label has also been criticized as denigrating or too suggestive of presentism, thinking about those activities only in relation to modern categories Direct evidence for scientific processes becomes clearer with the advent of writing systems in early civilizations like Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, creating the earliest written records in the history of science in around 3000 to 1200 BCE.Although the words and concepts of "science" and "nature" were not part of the conceptual landscape at the time, the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians made contributions that would later find a place in Greek and medieval science: mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.[ Branches of science Natural science Social science Formal science Applied science Interdisciplinary science Philosophy of science There are different schools of thought in the philosophy of science. The most popular position is empiricism, which holds that knowledge is created by a process involving observation; scientific theories generalize observations. Empiricism generally encompasses inductivism, a position that explains how general theories can be made from the finite amount of empirical evidence available. Many versions of empiricism exist, with the predominant ones being Bayesianism and the hypothetico-deductive method. Empiricism has stood in contrast to rationalism, the position originally associated with Descartes, which holds that knowledge is created by the human intellect, not by observation. Critical rationalism is a contrasting 20th-century approach to science, first defined by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rejected the way that empiricism describes the connection between theory and observation. He claimed that theories are not generated by observation, but that observation is made in the light of theories: that the only way theory A can be affected by observation is after theory A were to conflict with observation, but theory B were to survive the observation. Popper proposed replacing verifiability with falsifiability as the landmark of scientific theories, replacing induction with falsification as the empirical method. Popper further claimed that there is actually only one universal method, not specific to science: the negative method of criticism, trial and error, covering all products of the human mind, including science, mathematics, philosophy, and art. Technology. Engineering Technology is the application of knowledge for achieving practical goals in a reproducible way.The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life. Technological advancements have led to significant changes in society. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used during prehistoric times, followed by the control of fire, which contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language during the Ice Age. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age allowed greater travel and the creation of more complex machines. More recent technological inventions, including the printing press, telephone, and the Internet, have lowered barriers to communication and ushered in the knowledge economy. While technology contributes to economic development and improves human prosperity, it can also have negative impacts like pollution and resource depletion, and can cause social harms like technological unemployment resulting from automation. As a result, there are ongoing philosophical and political debates about the role and use of technology, the ethics of technology, and ways to mitigate its downsides. Technology is a term dating back to the early 17th century that meant 'systematic treatment' (from Greek Τεχνολογία, from the Greek: τέχνη, romanized: tékhnē, lit. 'craft, art' and -λογία, 'study, knowledge'). It is predated in use by the Ancient Greek word tékhnē, used to mean 'knowledge of how to make things', which encompassed activities like architecture. Starting in the 19th century, continental Europeans started using the terms Technik (German) or technique (French) to refer to a 'way of doing', which included all technical arts, such as dancing, navigation, or printing, whether or not they required tools or instruments. At the time, Technologie (German and French) referred either to the academic discipline studying the "methods of arts and crafts", or to the political discipline "intended to legislate on the functions of the arts and crafts." Since the distinction between Technik and Technologie is absent in English, both were translated as technology. The term was previously uncommon in English and mostly referred to the academic discipline, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the 20th century, as a result of scientific progress and the Second Industrial Revolution, technology stopped being considered a distinct academic discipline and took on its current-day meaning: the systemic use of knowledge to practical ends. Philosophy of technology Philosophy of technology is a branch of philosophy that studies the "practice of designing and creating artifacts", and the "nature of the things so created. It emerged as a discipline over the past two centuries, and has grown "considerably" since the 1970s. The humanities philosophy of technology is concerned with the "meaning of technology for, and its impact on, society and culture". Initially, technology was seen as an extension of the human organism that replicated or amplified bodily and mental faculties. Marx framed it as a tool used by capitalists to oppress the proletariat, but believed that technology would be a fundamentally liberating force once it was "freed from societal deformations". Secondwave philosophers like Ortega later shifted their focus from economics and politics to "daily life and living in a techno-material culture," arguing that technology could oppress "even the members of the bourgeoisie who were its ostensible masters and possessors." Third-stage philosophers like Don Ihde and Albert Borgmann represent a turn toward de-generalization and empiricism, and considered how humans can learn to live with technology. Early scholarship on technology was split between two arguments: technological determinism, and social construction. Technological determinism is the idea that technologies cause unavoidable social changes. It usually encompasses a related argument, technological autonomy, which asserts that technological progress follows a natural progression and cannot be prevented. Social constructivists argue that technologies follow no natural progression, and are shaped by cultural values, laws, politics, and economic incentives. Modern scholarship has shifted towards an analysis of sociotechnical systems, "assemblages of things, people, practices, and meanings", looking at the value judgments that shape technology. Cultural critic Neil Postman distinguished tool-using societies from technological societies and from what he called "technopolies," societies that are dominated by an ideology of technological and scientific progress to the detriment of other cultural practices, values, and world views. Herbert Marcuse and John Zerzan suggest that technological society will inevitably deprive us of our freedom and psychological health.[ Engineering Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. Fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application. See glossary of engineering. The term engineering is derived from the Latin ingenium, meaning "cleverness" and ingeniare, meaning "to contrive, devise". The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET) has defined "engineering" as: The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property. Medicine A 3 tesla clinical MRI scanner. Medicine and biology The study of the human body, albeit from different directions and for different purposes, is an important common link between medicine and some engineering disciplines. Medicine aims to sustain, repair, enhance and even replace functions of the human body, if necessary, through the use of technology. Genetically engineered mice expressing green fluorescent protein, which glows green under blue light. The central mouse is wild-type. Modern medicine can replace several of the body's functions through the use of artificial organs and can significantly alter the function of the human body through artificial devices such as, for example, brain implants and pacemakers. The fields of bionics and medical bionics are dedicated to the study of synthetic implants pertaining to natural systems. Conversely, some engineering disciplines view the human body as a biological machine worth studying and are dedicated to emulating many of its functions by replacing biology with technology. This has led to fields such as artificial intelligence, neural networks, fuzzy logic, and robotics. There are also substantial interdisciplinary interactions between engineering and medicine. Both fields provide solutions to real world problems. This often requires moving forward before phenomena are completely understood in a more rigorous scientific sense and therefore experimentation and empirical knowledge is an integral part of both. Medicine, in part, studies the function of the human body. The human body, as a biological machine, has many functions that can be modeled using engineering methods. The heart for example functions much like a pump, the skeleton is like a linked structure with levers,[102] the brain produces electrical signals etc. These similarities as well as the increasing importance and application of engineering principles in medicine, led to the development of the field of biomedical engineering that uses concepts developed in both disciplines. Newly emerging branches of science, such as systems biology, are adapting analytical tools traditionally used for engineering, such as systems modeling and computational analysis, to the description of biological systems. Thank you!
