Why do we Learn STEM?

AI has not changed the need to emphasize STEM skills across education, as STEM thinking will remain incredibly important for all students, regardless of their intended industry.

There is a consensus among educators, primarily in STEM, that students should be empowered tonpursue projects and pedagogical opportunities that support their ability to think critically in STEM fields. Significant funding and resources have been allocated to science fairs, robotics, olympiads, and hackathons to equip students with practical skills that will help them get into a “good” university and secure a “good” job.

While excelling in STEM certainly increases one’s marketability to schools and employers, assuming one wishes to pursue that route, the benefits of a rigorous STEM curriculum reach far beyond its practical applications in industry. Most STEM courses in K-12 schools and universities emphasize rote memorization and pattern-matching (e.g., derivatives, rudimentary algebra). Not only are these skills inapplicable in most environments after graduation, but they also do not support critical thinking due to their lack of rigor. However, educators often cite only the first reason for investing in STEM competitions, as they’re naïvely considered more applicable than traditional STEM classes. While this may be true, the second issue in current education is far more important, and something that my research is optimizing for: requiring students to think critically and solve non-trivial problems that may or may not be applicable to their future work.

That is, I strongly believe that whether the skill is practical or conceptual, if a student is learning high-level problem-solving, their critical thinking skills will be inherently important in whatever field they work in.