Whenever we do a startup of new things the important thing that comes to our mind is how possible will be the implication of this new application? The same think when we talk about STEM the first thing that strikes our mind is, how it will impact the pattern of education in India? STEM is something which is built on very basic component that includes science skills.
Any factor that is going to change the present reality like how students are going to taught in classrooms everything depend on how it is built. Here is such things we are going to discuss, some of the building factor of STEM education in India: Atal Tinkering Labs.
STEM Education in India
The Government has involved deeply by introducing many initiatives and policies such as Make in India and Skill India with important objective of stepping up India to a higher level in academic and scientific excellence. This has implied a large amount of pressure and demand for STEM Education in India and also in turn it also requires a lot of highly skilled graduates.
India's huge population of young learner was the greatest challenge that was faced by the education sector. Most of the population was under the economically challenging conditions. With this situation, each educational institution should need to develop scientific and technological innovations.
According to the survey that was conducted by The Wall Street Journal in 2011, 75% of India's graduates are not qualified for jobs in high-tech global industries of India. Therefore, many private and government initiatives have been established to introduce and provide STEM initiatives both in primary, secondary and higher education in India.
It was also observed that only required number of students were registered to STEM categories of education. More than being a wish list, STEM learning and education in India has become a great demand and necessity for the young learners of India. While India mostly require to meet up the development in the STEM learning arena, for which it has indeed taken off to invest in the same wisely.
Role of educators in STEM Education
In this developing society with advancement, the main keystone is considered to be the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Electronic Building Blocks, Robotics & 3D Printing are the best, innovative and efficient ways of teaching STEM Education. Teachers makes the students to have a best learning experience with hands-on/exploratory learning and also help the kids to enhance their analytical and problem-solving skills.
Corporates focus on STEM
Many of the corporate companies are also involved in the development of STEM. One among them is, Communication technology giant, Verizon, which have announced for a competition of their annual Innovative Learning App Challenge. This is a competition for both middle and high school students across the U.S.. They were asked to develop mobile app concepts which helps to solve a problem in their local communities. This helps in Promoting teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, STEM skills and coding. The competition attracted many students and got over 1,800 submissions.
Evolution of STEM education in India
In India, you can notice that there are lot of new emerging techniques with regards to STEM:
Every school is moving towards incorporating STEM in their schools and planning to look beyond smart classrooms. They also plan for hands-on learning and STEM enhancement along with their current information and communications technology.
Schools reaches out to STEM companies to get help from them to set up STEM centres, tinkering labs which is integrated with emerging technologies like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
Government is also involved in this by helping the schools with advanced library infrastructures, which is included with engaging learning assets and management tools, assessment systems, implementing Learning Management Systems, language labs, library management system, gamification, etc.
Nowadays, we could get lot of new 'entry level' coding devices in the market which helps the students to learn simple coding and also it helps to get STEM to life in the classroom.
Increasing demand
In last few years, there is an increasing demand for incorporating STEM in schools. It's more effective and efficient to provide the schools with all required tools and funds to build STEM into their curriculum and have to be integrated in the classroom, which will attract the next generation of coders. Also STEM developers are working towards incorporating many new creative techniques to make sure that kids are more likely to be interested in the 'do it yourself' method.
Now we are in a century where there is a great demand for STEM graduates because most of the jobs are STEM jobs which requires STEM players. According to the National Science Foundation, it is said in next decade most of the jobs nearly 80%, will require some form of math and science skills. Inspite of moving all the talents towards exam-focused education model it is required students to be taught these along with innovation, problem-solving and creativity. Here comes the role of STEM players to fill this gap.
It is been shown in certain research that usually children gets interested in STEM fields at an average age of eight. This is because nowadays kids are more attracted towards technology, gadgets and gizmos. But when the kids are in to this leap its very hard to come back but it is a very slow transition. In India, the major link engineering-technology-entrepreneurship is evidently missing.