APPROACH TO THE STEAM MODEL FOR CONSOLIDATING LEARNING PHYSICS TOPICS

In the 21st century, the need to learn science is a fact and therefore there is interest around the world to find strategies and methods to teach them in an efficient way in the school environment, both to lay the foundation for university careers in engineering and science, as for the understanding of the environment. The STEAM model for science education is one of the possible options for this need. The explanation of this model can be summarized in the combination of the disciplines that give it its name: science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics to solve a problem or carry out a project, working in collaborative teams. This paper presents an experience of approaching the STEAM model with pre-university students from a Mexican educational institution, the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute), in a one-semester course in the subject called Physics II. The exercise consisted of three stages in which students formed teams to carry out small projects on specific topics of the physics class: friction force, transformation of mechanical energy and hydraulics. The objectives were twofold: to consolidate the learning and to explore the possibility of working under the STEAM model scheme. The students were asked to form teams of between 3 and 6 people, explaining that they had to work collaboratively, that is, contributing all to achieve the proposed goal. In the first stage, the students were asked to apply their ingenuity to Physics in order to show evidence of their learning of the subject of frictional force in the application of this. For the second stage, the use of technology had to be added to present the topic of mechanical energy transformation and in the third stage, they had to add to their work an art content to the topic of hydrostatics. The use of mathematics was suggested in the three stages, but the students did not approach it, in such a way that in this exercise the incorporation of 4 of the 5 disciplines of the STEAM model was achieved. In order to evaluate this exercise of approximation to the use of the STEAM model, a qualitative evaluation was used in two parts: that carried out by the professor and another one, carried out by the students on themselves; in both cases, a range scale was used as an evaluation instrument. The results were satisfactory, both in terms of the process and in terms of learning and the motivational aspect.