Welcome to STEAM Bloom’s new website! My name is Mehar, and I am a high-school student at The Hotchkiss School (in CT). Pahal, who studies at the Excelsior American School in India, and I are co- founders and co-presidents of STEAM Bloom.
STEM fields do not currently reflect the diversity of the US. STEM continues to be dominated by white males, while women and other racial and ethnic minorities continue to be underrepresented. Women are significantly underrepresented in STEM majors — for instance, only around 21% of engineering majors are women and only around 19% of computer and information science majors are women. African Americans and Hispanics make up 11% and 16% of the U.S. workforce overall respectively but represent 9% and 7% of all STEM workers. Low-income students in the U.S. account for only 14% of students in the nation’s top 200 postsecondary institutions. Diversity and poverty
challenges squander a wealth of STEM potential.
At the same time, we feel there is a huge opportunity to integrate STEM with Arts. The world is not segmented into perfectly contained blocks, and therefore it makes sense that education shouldn’t be either. Art and science should not be seen as two opposite ends of the spectrum. Art has been discovered as an effective means to express the sciences; Similarly, the problem-solving abilities of a mathematician are beneficial to an artist. Historically, art played a big role in the work of scientists like Charles Darwin and Leonardo da Vinci. Even, Einstein was the product of a well-rounded education. Einstein was an accomplished violinist; he confessed to thinking about science in terms of images and intuitions, often drawn directly from his experiences as a musician, only later converting these into logic, words and mathematics. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs reinforced the important role of arts during his unveiling of a new edition of the iPad when he said: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” Multidisciplinary learning truly provides an amazing holistic approach for understanding different academic areas.
We have put together this website which is our honest attempt to provide access to world-class STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education and resources to diverse students (females, minorities and students from low-income backgrounds). Although both Pahal and I have interest in STEM, we have different interests in the field of arts; she is more inclined towards visual arts and poetry, while I love performing arts. Leveraging our strengths, we decided that besides the traditional avenues of exposing students to STEM concepts (to start with), we would over time incorporate a unique art-focused approach. Over time, we plan to host a variety of STEAM related events, webinars, and workshops for free. We will use
the medium of different art forms (e.g., music, poetry, drawing, painting, theatre, dance, sculpture, architecture) to make STEM more accessible and interesting for the diverse students who would otherwise feel intimidated learning CS, Math and other STEM fields.
We are excited about this initiative, where we strive to create excellent opportunities of STEAM learning for all. We personally invite you to join this movement too.
With lots of love!
Mehar and Pahal
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