Communications of the ACM
The 'Maker Movement' Inspires Shift in STEM Curriculum
Students learn STEM skills by making apps in a curriculum inspired by the maker movement.
Credit: Fab Magazine Online
A new curriculum from the Digital Harbor Foundation, BatelleEd, and Arizona State University reflects a shift that is occurring in education, from passive to active learning, inspired by the maker movement. The STEM Core curriculum emphasizes inquiry, projects, and production around app development, and at the end of the process students will have an app to market in app stores. The mindset is one of wanting producers and someone who is not just making a website to learn, says Digital Harbor executive director Andrew Coy. Students will get to apply what they learn immediately.
The schools that plan to use STEM Core this fall will not be giving students information to regurgitate, but will have students find solutions to problems that are rarely addressed. Students will use Corona SDK as a mobile development framework and Lua as the programming language, and their apps can be exported to the native iOS and Android platforms once they are finished.
"All innovations and innovation economies rely on this ability to solve a currently unsolved problem, but so much in education revolves around solving questions that already have known answers," Coy says.
From Center for Digital Education
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