Computer Graphics in STEAM Education

Before the pandemic, our STEAM program was composed mainly of Vex robotics, Arduino electronics, and 3D printing at St. Paul American School (SPAS) in Clark, Philippines. Then the pandemic forced us into online education for 5 straight semesters. When transitioning to online learning, our Head of School challenged us to be innovative with our lessons, so it seemed like the right time to experiment with other STEAM education technologies. As the STEAM Coordinator, I decided to use the Blender computer graphics software to help perpetuate our students’ love of STEAM subjects during their online classes.

Blender is a completely free and open source software with a highly active online community. Many step-by-step lesson videos are publicly available on the internet. Although Blender was not originally designed as an education software and rarely is it ever used in STEAM education, it was easy to see the potential of this software. At SPAS, we used Blender to augment our high school math, programming, biochemistry, astronomy, history, architecture, and engineering lessons.

Example biochemistry student work:

Example astronomy student work:

Example architecture student work:

In particular, Blender offers a nice framework for building physics simulations. In the Fall semester, our high school engineering students first studied how to create physics simulations in Blender. Then they followed the engineering design process (EDP), as described by NASA, to design and build their virtual battle bots. In the Spring semester, those same students enrolled in a follow-up computer animation course, where they focused on the aesthetics and graphics rendering for their physics simulation.

Shown below is the first iteration of a physics simulation that students designed in Blender for their virtual battle bots competition.

Below are highlights of the final version.

For more examples of student work, please visit:

https://sites.google.com/view/steam-graphics/

Computer graphics has tremendous potential to impact and inspire our STEAM students. Drawbacks are that there can often be a sizable learning curve for computer graphics software and currently there appears to be very few publicly available examples of integrating advanced computer graphics into traditional high school lesson plans. I recommend TinkerCAD for teachers and students wishing to get started with computer graphics in the classroom. In the future, I hope to encourage my students to create online lesson videos explaining their process, so that other students and teachers can learn from their experience.

More information about Blender can be found here.

I have also had success using the following websites in my online STEAM classes:

VEXcode VR - programming virtual robots in a web browser.

Code.org - lesson plans and activities for computer programming.

TinkerCAD - activities for 3D design and building virtual Arduino circuits.

Minecraft education - lesson plans and activities for computer programming.

If you were able to successfully integrate other computer graphics or STEAM software into your lessons, please share in the comments section below!

Please feel free to contact me at m a d r i d n @ s t p a u l c l a r k . c o m (no spaces) for further discussion.