Keywords

Introduction

In the present century, science and technology has combined with human life in a more humane and artistic way than ever before. The iPhone, introduced by Steve Jobs, an artistic engineer, is a good example of how science and technology combine with human life in a human-friendly and artistic way. This societal demand has been reflected in the educational community, and the Ministry of Education and Science of South Korea has established various educational strategies for educating students to create fused talents [1].

In 2009, Partnership for Twenty first-Century Skills, an organization in the U.S., suggested essential skills that students need to learn and master in order to succeed in the twenty first century [2]. The organization suggested that students should learn such skills as creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration through art, mathematics, science, economics, and history. That is, learners need to develop the ability to fuse diverse skills holistically based on creativity to be able to adapt to the rapidly changing society of the twenty first century and to get ahead of the times.

The government stressed the importance of STEAM education to train people with such holistic talents and is now preparing various strategies for educating them. This study aimed to develop a STEAM education program that can be applied in the field, using technology and engineering Scratch, which can be easily accessed by learners in the aforementioned context.

Theoretical Background

Need for and Definition of STEAM

Smart STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics and means learning the fused knowledge of various fields. The effort to find the cause of the economic crisis in the U.S. led to the identification of the decrease in the academic performance of mathematics and science learners as the cause [3, 4]. To address this problem, STEAM aims to promote the learners’ motivation for learning and to educate people so as to help them become capable of solving multidisciplinary problems.

Regarding STEAM fusion education, Yakman (2008) presented a pyramid model consisting of several levels, from continuing education to the classification of the detailed study contents and stated that the interdisciplinary integrative level was appropriate for elementary school education [5].

Although in most of the current STEAM education programs computers serve only as auxiliary tools, in this study, it was used as a main activity in the fusion education for applying and utilizing the science lessons. That is, the students can clearly understand the lesson contents and can see the process and result of making programs real-time. Thus, the possible errors in the real-life experiment can be reduced, and the students can have opportunities to apply and express the scientific principle in various ways using divergent and creative methods, without temporal and spatial restrictions.

Design and Making of the Steam Education Program

Design of the Stages of Steam Teaching and Learning

Study stages were established as follows to develop the STEAM education program using Scratch, and to apply the developed program. The study was conducted for 6 months, according to the study stages. The teaching and learning stages for science and technology presented by Miaoulis (2009) and the creative comprehensive design stages for people with inter-disciplinary talents presented by Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity (2011) were reviewed to design the stages for STEAM teaching and learning that will be applied to the education field.

Table 1 shows the stages for creative design presented by Korea Foundation for Advancement of Science and Creativity when it introduced the concept of creative comprehensive design education. The foundation explained that the stages are the characteristics of the new STEAM education.

Table 1 Stages for creative design presented by Korea foundation for advancement of science and creativity
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Based on this, six stages of STEAM teaching and learning Table 2 were determined, and the program was conducted. In particular, during the “making or synthesizing” and “testing” stages, creative work was accomplished by frequently making and modifying the activities. Thus, continuous testing and feedback are required.

Table 2 Stages of STEAM teaching and learning
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Formulation of the Steam Education Program

The units were constructed, using the stages of the STEAM teaching and learning activities and the categorized science experiment themes. Activities for making games using Scratch were included considering that the learners are elementary school students, who are highly interested in games, and that various artistic activities, such as plotting a story, selecting background music, and drawing characters, are complexly performed for game creation.

At the “experiencing priming water for an idea” stage of each unit, the teachers pre-sent Scratch games to help the learners come up with an idea. At the “coming up with an idea” stage, the learners are allowed to present and discuss the games that they want to make, and by doing so, to share the ideas with one another.

At the “planning and integrative design” stage, the learners are allowed to make a storyboard based on the various science experiments presented in the textbook. Many storyboards can be made, according to the experiment, or only one storyboard can be made in detail. The learners are allowed to make storyboards freely, without restrictions in theme and expression. At the “making and synthesizing” stage, the learners are allowed to formulate “instructions on how to play the game made” based on the storyboard made, and to make games using Scratch.

At the “testing” stage, the learners can modify the game by playing it with their collaborators, and by reviewing it. There was no boundary between the “making or synthesizing” and “testing” stages, allowing the learners to make, synthesize, and review activities whenever they needed to do so, and by doing so, to complete creative works like those shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
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The game completed after the review with the collaborators, and after modification

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In addition, the learners can write what they felt through these two stages in “Instructions on how to play the game made.” The learners who made a maze game through several stages added mazes to the game by reviewing the game together with their collaborators (Fig. 2) and by completing the final game.

Fig. 2
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Games made by other learners

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At the “evaluation” stage, the learners can display the games that they made, and can play these, so as to evaluate one another’s games. The learners can also refine their ideas by sharing their completed ideas with others.

Application of the Program and Analysis of the Results

Study Design and Control of Variables

Two classes in the 6th grade of Elementary School in Jeju City, Jeju Island, South Korea were included in the study (Table 3). The classes were assigned as the experimental and control groups, respectively. For 10 weeks, from the fourth week of September 2011 to the first week of December 2011, the Scratch-based STAEM education program was conducted in the experimental group, on the two units of the science textbook.

Table 3 Experimental group
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As shown in Table 3, a test of baseline creativity and an evaluation of the affective characteristics associated with science were performed in the two groups, and the homogeneity of the two groups was validated. For the control group, a normal science class was conducted as planned.

Test Tools

The area that this study intended to identify through objective validation after the application of the Scratch-based STEAM education program was the creativity and affective characteristics associated with science. To determine if the creativity had been enhanced, Torrance’s TTCT (diagram) Creativity Test Type A was performed before and after the experiment. In addition, “Evaluation System for Affective Characteristics (Attitude) Related with National Science” developed by Hyonam et al. [6] at the Science Education Institute of Korea National University of Education, based on the theory on science-related attitude presented by Klopfer and the criteria for evaluation items presented by Edward, was used for the test of affective characteristics related with science. Type A consisted of items evaluating the awareness of and interest in science, and type B consisted of items evaluating scientific attitude. For the reliability of the items, the Chronbach alpha coefficients were 0.83 and 0.86 for types A and B, respectively. As both exceeded 0.8, they were deemed reliable.

Results of the Creativity Test and Interpretation of the Results

To verify the homogeneity of the factors of creativity between the experimental and control groups, the mean of each area of creativity in each group was tested through a t test, using SPSS 12.0 for Windows, before the experimental treatment (p = 0.05). As shown in Table 4, the significance probability for the creativity index was p = 0.929; thus, there was no significant difference in creativity between the experimental and control groups. The other areas of creativity, such as fluency, creativity, abstracting ability, and delicacy, were not significantly different between the two groups as the significance probability was higher than 0.05.

Table 4 Test of baseline creativity
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Ten weeks later, the creativity test was performed again on the experimental and control groups. As shown in Table 5, the creativity and originality were significantly different between the groups, with p = 0.036 and p = 0.039, respectively. In particular, the post-experiment creativity increased by 10.17, and the significance level was remarkably different, with p = 0.000 (p < 0.05) in the experimental group.

Table 5 Post results comparing
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Then, the difference in creativity before and after the experiment was compared within the experimental group and was analyzed. As shown in Table 6, in the comparison of the fluency, originality, and creativity index before and after the experiment within the experimental group, the significance probability was less than 0.05; thus, the difference was significant. It was found that Scratch-based STEAM education had a positive effect on the improvement of the fluency, originality, and creativity index.

Table 6 Results of the test of creativity by time point
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Results of the Test of Affective Characteristics Related with Science

The evaluation of affective characteristics developed by Hyonam et al. [6] consists of three categories (awareness, interest, and scientific attitude), and each item is graded based on a 5-point Likert scale. The results of the pre-experiment test showed that compared with the control group, the awareness of science was low (0.548 points), the interest in science was high (0.008), and the scientific attitude was high (0.284) in the experimental group (Table 7).

Table 7 Results of the test of affective characteristics related with science
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The post-experiment test showed that the mean of awareness (C) of science in-creased by 0.168, the interest in science (I) by 0.231, and the scientific attitude (A) by 0.281. In particular, compared with the control group, the awareness and interest of the experimental group considerably increased. The results showed that the Scratch-based STEAM education program had a positive effect on the affective characteristics related with science in the experimental group.

Conclusions

This study aimed to develop and apply a STEAM education program that can be applied to elementary school education, and to show the effect of the program according to the education for people with integrated talents stressed by the Ministry of Education and Science. Towards these ends, foreign and local studies on STEAM were reviewed, and appropriate subjects and contents that could be applied to the education were selected and combined with Scratch, an educational programming language. In addition, to increase the appropriateness of the program, discussion with and inter-views of experts in schools and colleges were performed during the selection of education contents and the designing of the stages of teaching and learning. Then, the developed STEAM education program was applied to the students for 10 weeks, under the condition where all the possible variables were controlled. The fluency, originality, and creativity index significantly increased in the experimental group, which used the STEAM education program, as opposed to the control group, and the positive answers in the area of awareness of and interest in the affective area considerably increased in the experimental group. These results indicate that the Scratch-based STEAM education program has a positive effect on the creativity and affective characteristics related with science. In addition, the STEAM education program developed in this study has the two following meanings: (1) STEAM education was utilized without interrupting the flow of the units of the science textbook, to allow the smooth progression of the current curriculum; and (2) using the educational programming language, methods of fusing science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics to attain what STEAM intends to achieve were presented.