Art in STEM

Students would often come into my room asking to wash their hands from Art class. I would ask what they’re doing and it would always be something really cool — like painting, using clay, or even scratch art. I also noticed that they loved being creative, so I wanted to integrate this into a STEM classroom.

We were learning about voltage, current, and resistance and doing series and parallel circuit calculations. Voltage is a measure of stored potential energy between two points, current is the rate at which the electricity is flowing, and resistance is a material’s tendency to resist the flow of a charge or current.

I didn’t want my students to focus on memorizing the textbook definition on these terms, but understand the connections between these three terms. To allow students to make these definitions their own, I had them create an analogy or a story that could explain voltage, current, and resistance to someone who never took an engineering course before.

Here’s what they came up with!

The students had a lot of fun in this activity and I found that even though the definitions were elementary in comparison to the level I want them to understand, I noticed that their understanding of the content was actually enhanced by trying to explain it in a story. Their understanding of the complex definition was strengthened and this is something that I’ll definitely continue doing.