Abstract
As STEAM education has received growing attention in early childhood in recent years, how can we provide young children quality experience of STEAM learning? High-quality STEAM education project resources are a solid foundation for STEAM education quality assurance. The article takes striking phenomena in children's lives as a key point to extract and design micro-projects for STEAM education for young children. The main ideas behind the micro-projects design are as following: (1) Effectively capturing the striking life phenomena that can evoke a strong experience of children. (2) Extracting the key scientific problem and inferring progressive problems behind the phenomena. (3) Defining the micro-project and clarifying the composition of its sub-projects. (4) Realizing the integral elements of STEAM learning, etc. In a word, the micro-project design aims to establish interdisciplinary connections through in-depth exploration based on striking life phenomena and real problems. Taking the fingerprint of preschooler’s fingertips as an example, behind the striking phenomena the key scientific question "What is the genetic secret (e.g., the genetic mechanisms)" can be extracted, and then a series of progressive questions like "What is the fingerprint? Is there any difference in fingerprints among children?" "Is the child’s fingerprint the same as that of his/her parents?", "Does the child look the same as his/her parents?" "How can fingerprint be applied into our lives" can be drawn. To establish and clarify the micro-project and sub-projects based on these questions, and then to define embedded STEAM learning elements and other information. This is the design process and the main composition of a micro-project. These could be an effective way to boost quality project resource exploration for young children’s STEAM education. Issues for further exploration are also discussed.
Highlights
STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics education) is an educational concept of interdisciplinary integration of science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics, etc.; it aims to train compound talents who are good at questioning and innovative. [1] Though STEAM education is acting as one of the biggest educational reform and an important strategy for scientific and technological competition globally, researches primarily focus on the middle and high school levels
Research on STEAM education for young children is relatively limited at present,[2, 3]; the theoretical and practical research of preschool STEAM in China is much scarce. [4, 5] The preschool children are full of curiosity about the world
The preschool period is considered to be a sensitive period for the development of individual STEAM interests, so how to provide quality STEAM education for preschool children? How to design STEAM educational activities according to the characteristics of preschool children? The specific implementation of STEAM education is both the focus of research and the difficulties in practice
Summary
STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics education) is an educational concept of interdisciplinary integration of science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics, etc.; it aims to train compound talents who are good at questioning and innovative. [1] Though STEAM education is acting as one of the biggest educational reform and an important strategy for scientific and technological competition globally, researches primarily focus on the middle and high school levels. Focusing on the quality of preschool STEAM education practice in China, it is very important to cut into research from the specific implementation of project activity design. Some scholar has proposed ways in which preschool STEAM education can learn from projects,[4] some scholar has proposed a micro-education model based on the striking phenomena in children's lives. [10] this article intends to focus on the need for STEAM education at the early childhood level, using the concept of project learning to develop micro-project based on striking life phenomena, thereby providing practical ideas and reference framework for preschool STEAM education and quality projects design in future. It can arouse children's strong interest and doubts, which is a striking life phenomenon
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