Why are real-world events so important to STEAM education?

Why are real-world events so important to STEAM education? Your child’s natural desire to learn, experiment and question is fundamentally important to their education and development, so at BIS Hanoi we don’t give our students all of the answers. Instead, we give them some of life’s most interesting questions and challenges, and the tools to tackle them. Our aim for your child is that they learn creativity and resilience throughout their education with us. When they leave school and take their first steps into university and beyond, we want them to do so with the confidence of real global citizens. The question is, how do we teach that?

Your child’s natural desire to learn, experiment and question is fundamentally important to their education and development, so at BIS Hanoi we don’t give our students all of the answers. Instead, we give them some of life’s most interesting questions and challenges, and the tools to tackle them. Our aim for your child is that they learn creativity and resilience throughout their education with us. When they leave school and take their first steps into university and beyond, we want them to do so with the confidence of real global citizens. The question is, how do we teach that?

Exploring real-world challenges with STEAM

STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics, but it equates to more than a series of subjects. Whether in the classroom or through our extra-curricular platform Global Campus, our teaching and thinking around STEAM is the key to your child learning about their impact on the world around them.

STEAM takes the natural curiosity which students have as young learners in early years and primary, through to their teenage years in secondary school, and builds on it with a contextualised, skills-based approach to teaching. It encourages the natural instincts your child has for learning about where they are, how things work, why it matters, and asks them to apply that curiosity to solving real-world challenges.

Our exclusive collaboration with MIT

Underlying our STEAM education is our exclusive collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This relationship with MIT brings opportunities to our students which go far beyond their curriculum and the classroom. Your child might participate in our new MIT Abstracts series which gives them access to lectures with MIT professors, learning about what they are researching and the impact it will have on our lives, take on classroom or special at-home science challenges like our new Home Labs series, or even visit the MIT campus. The objective behind all MIT teaching is for students to understand and identify a real problem, and collaboratively take on the challenge of finding a solution to it - truly putting their creativity to test.

In 2019, four of our students got the opportunity to attend the STEAM Week at MIT along with more than 100 Nord Anglia students. This trip was a great chance for the students to get immersed in the university's culture of "Mind and Hand" by thinking through new concepts and working together to solve problems. 

Our most recent STEAM challenge

In school, we set themed challenges each term which relate to real world events so that students can contextualise what they learn. Most recently, for example, our theme has been space. BIS Hanoi and peers around the world had an exciting opportunity to join a MIT challenge, set by Dr Jeff Hoffman, a five times astronaut and MIT professor, who developed the filtration device on a spaceship headed to Mars. In this challenge, the students have been focussing on the Mars Perseverance mission, known as MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment), and the challenges it will face on Mars.

Students were very excited to join the challenge as they got to take apart an old air purifier to investigate how the filter works and from that to figure out how MOXIE will filter dust on Mars. Under the guidance of the MIT team and BIS STEAM teacher Mr Burke, our students will then develop and test their own filtration device. 

STEAM for young children

We understand the importance of STEAM for all children, from our youngest to our oldest students. As part of Nord Anglia Education, our students, in all ages, have the opportunity to learn on Global Campus, an exclusive online learning platform which connect 67,000 students from our family of school all around the world.  

The Forest School is an interactive activities hub on Global Campus which shares engaging, outdoor tasks with our early years students each week. The aim of these activities, like town and city scavenger hunts, or nature walks, is to encourage young learners to begin engaging with the environment around them so that they can later understand their role within their local community, and beyond, and how they can make a positive impact on it.

Discover more
STEAM learning provides amazing experiences which teach our students about what being a global citizen really means. For more on how we teach STEAM, please visit “Our Approach to STEAM” page or get in touch with our admissions team.