Creativity and Serendipity in STEAM Education

From the 4E Cognition approach, creativity in technological educational environments is conceived as an emerging phenomenon and historically condensed in skillful practices of material engagement, which opens up unprecedented possibilities during the coupling of person, materials and tools. In this presentation, the case of STEAM education is presented to students who attend a summer school for two weeks to address the generation of a smart garbage dump through project-based learning. Through an ethnographic design, descriptions of the process of change in the creation of personal artifacts are reported, in which each boy and girl follows their own route of inspiration to create prototypes with the available materials and technologies (AI, 3D Modeling and Printing, Programming with arduinos and Scratch) your own smart trash can. The findings show that the synergy between people, materials and technological tools enriches the ways of thinking about things, generating collaborative and challenging educational processes that give way to more robust techno-scientific notions, performatively translated into new prototypes as a result of distributed creativity in dynamic sociomaterial environments. We consider that exchange of ideas, the use of digital tools and technologies generate a fertile field to cultivate creativity from the traces, footprints, and materials that emerge from intuitive notions captured in initial sketches to minimum viable prototypes that integrate digital technologies.

Ronnie Videla has a Bachelor in Education, Master in Psychology (University of La Serena, Chile) and Doctor in Education from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. He is a researcher at the Faculty of Education of the Santo Tomas University, Chile. He has specialized in cognitive science and educational innovation, particularly with the 4E Cognition approach and the Maker movement for STEAM education. He is the founder of InnovaSteam Lab for the design of interdisciplinary and embodied educational environments with creative technologies. He has been trained in the fundamentals of cultural biology with Humberto Maturana and Ximena Dávila at the Escuela Matríztica.