Source: 

Schools around the country are expanding programs with the goal of providing their students the science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics skills that will put them on the path to success in school and future careers. As educators focus on teaching technical knowledge and skills, it’s easy to lose sight of an essential part of STEAM education: helping students develop an understanding of how their high-tech work might affect themselves and their fellow human beings.

SmartBrief Education chatted about STEAM and ethics with Mitch Rosenberg, CEO of KinderLab, maker of KIBO, a screen-free STEAM robot kit. Kibo is designed by Marina Umaschi Bers and her DevTech Research Group at Tufts University. In this interview, Rosenberg talks about how, as he puts it, “Ethics is behind everything we do—from our employees, to the value of our robot and what it offers our youngest learners.”

Students can apply STEAM skills to anything from building with Legos to creating malicious computer code. How do you design activities that emphasize responsible application of these skills?

Rosenberg: Of course, any skill can be used for good or ill, including literacy, communication, and STEAM skills. The important thing to developing an ethical basis for using skills is to imagine the people who will use your creation. 

Our curricula are focused not only on the question of how to build something, but also on the why question. For example, when our curriculum introduces the general process for designing things, half of the steps of that process involve talking to potential users, sharing your hypotheses with them, and imagining how they would use things. Moreover, unlike screen-based STEAM tools for students, KIBO encourages collaboration and team processes during the design, building, coding, and decorating of their STEAM creations.

While no curriculum can enforce the use of any body of knowledge exclusively for good, our observation is that when students work with each other, they are more likely to consider the impact of their creation on others, including potential users of it. 

Click here to read the full article.