There, and elsewhere, the adoption of STEM is aligned with gender parity. Margaret’s School in Victoria, BC, was an early adopter, the country’s first girl’s school to have a fully-fledged STEM program. The introduction of STEM-specific programming is a bit of a rising tide in the private school market across the country. It’s about parity in the workplace, as well as making sure that talent is encouraged and applied to the best advantage for all. That’s coupled with an awareness that industry benefits from a proliferation of voices, perspectives, and approaches. Girls want to be involved in tech, but often there remain hurdles to involvement. She’s right of course, and in all kinds of ways. “Now more than ever it’s important to see strong female leadership in the tech industry,” says Reshma Saujani, CEO & Founder of Girls Who Code, one of the most visible STEM programs out there today. If there is a dark side to STEM, it’s the awareness that women continue to be underrepresented in industry, something that can be a catalyst for the adoption of a STEM approach. Those things are less in evidence today than they once were, but STEM programs take that even further and work to make the sciences inviting, approachable, and inspiring. In some ways, the goal of STEM programs is to get beyond the prejudices that we might have about the sciences, including, say, the difficulty of physics or the nerdiness of computer coding. To get school-choice advice customized to your child's unique traits, create a child profile through your user account. Read our advice guide on choosing a school for a STEM-oriented child and for kids with other traits. Yes, there are still bricks and inclined planes, but they're a starting point, rather than an endpoint of study. Physics isn't so much a thing unto itself, but rather a set of ideas, principles, and tools that can be used to help answer questions and solve problems. STEM programs, in contrast, are curiosity-driven, applied to real-world problems, ranging across disciplines, and conducted in collaboration with others. Physics, for example, was the class that we took, and little if any effort was made to relate it to the other science disciplines or, all too often, practical application. That’s what distinguishes STEM programs from the science classes that we knew when we were in grade school and high school. Math: identifying patterns, making connections, communicating results.Engineering: building, understanding material properties, designing effective solutions.Technology: applying analytic tools, putting ideas into practice, being inventive.Science: questioning, observing, predicting. STEM programs achieve that, largely, through problem-based learning, with each of the elements providing tools for discovery, creative problem solving, and communication: The best STEM programs are ones that not only stress the academic areas, but do so in an interdisciplinary way they are programs where the sciences aren’t siloed-learning math in one classroom and chemistry in another-but integrated so that students not only perceive the connections between them, but also apprehend their mutual application. In practice, however, it’s much more than that.
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