🔎Scientific Building Blocks Make the City

  Though we study in the rural areas, our teachers design more than traditional handicraft aesthetic courses. They combined the characteristics of local agriculture and culture and planned interdisciplinary "Aesthetic Makers" STEAM courses. “STEAM” stands for “Science”, “Technology”, “Engineering”, “Arts” and “Mathematics.” When interviewing teachers, we realized the purpose of this course is to combine our excellent aesthetic competency and scientific competency, help us have thinking and problem-solving skills, and enhance competitive capability.

  The aesthetic maker courses include four learning steps and they are playing, doing, thinking and creating. They hope we have problem-solving ability by the four-step learning circle. The purpose of playing and grouping finished products can raise our interest and stimulate our further learning. Through touching and operating, we got learning experience. Therefore, the school designed a series of STEAM courses which often attracts many students from other schools to join us. The whole school students could learn the courses after school and during the winter and summer vacations. The first unplugged logical scientific technology training course is “Scientific Building Blocks Make the City.” First, we learned a series of indoor and outdoor lessons about our hometown. Second, the principal and teachers guided us to understand the functions of different building blocks structures through scientific building blocks. And then we exerted our imagination to design the buildings and landscape facilities we want to build in our hometown.

  To combine these works, we needed to cooperate with our classmates. We needed to calculate and think about how many blocks can complete the design. We needed continuous testing and improvement to complete a movable car. It required everyone’s cooperation to build the city . Therefore, when everyone's work was completed, we would extremely look forward to combining everyone's work in the next stage, complete and create the building block city on our urban design layout.

  • source:
  • Yushan Chang (2018). STEAM Maker- Interdisciplinary Integration, Implementing 12 year basic education policy.
  • Taiwan Educational Review Monthly, 7(2), pages 01-05.