Uncovering the love of STEM

It’s no secret that STEM education, and the professional fields it can launch students into, is primarily driven by white males. Statistics such as, “women earned only 17% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees in 2014”​ ​ and “underrepresented minorities earn only 11% of all engineering degrees”​ ​ put the issue into perspective. A big thing to consider is in all likelihood the next Alexander Fleming, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Wright Brothers, etc., won’t be white males…at least in an ideal world where girls and minorities are given equal access to the necessary conditions to brew such applicable genius.

Access to the inspirational experiences that inspire such innovative and impressionable minds is another barrier, when it is realized that not everyone has access to affordable museums, Netflix documentaries, and automatic STEM education in school. One solution to this complicated problem is games, specifically the ones “designed to have a social impact.”​ ​One example of games’ powerful influence on education is how the Chicago Public Library staff found “that when games were positioned alongside [books], book loans went up by a factor of three,”​ ​which proves that games don’t just rot your brain, but can enhance it too. This revelation is seen in “the growing recognition that games offer an oblique approach to nearly any long standing issue that can be improved through learning or behaviour change.”

One such game is Second Avenue Learning and Rochester Institute of Technology’s Martha’s ​ Marvelous Machines. “​Researchers discovered [when they connected engineering concepts] to [real life], player’s engagement dramatically increased. [Furthermore, the] girls were talking about physics or game play 76% of the time and were only off topic 5% of the time.”​ ​With perceptions of girls, minorities, and traditionally white-male-fields changing, girls and minorities will eventually meet less disenchantment when pursuing STEM education and careers. This means future innovators like the prolific Katherine Johnson (a leading NASA aerospace technologist) and Mary Jackson (NASA’s first black female engineer) won’t have to jump through the hoops (such as night school for classes not initially offered to non-white students) they had to in order to become engineers and scientists.

Education scientist Sugata Mitra suggests that “children will learn to do, what they want to learn to do” in fast fashion when given access to information from the Internet.​ ​An unignorable amount of girls and minorities want to pursue STEM education and careers and “if [these] children have interest, then education happens,” even to the point that children can improve their language skills through Google searches.6​ ​This access to technology-based games has proven exceptionally beneficial as “70% of teachers [polled] said they saw an increase in student engagement when using educational video games.”

There’s no denying games can have positive impacts on education and players. With increased accessibility offered by online and mobile games, your bandwidth is the limit for initiating a lifelong infatuation with STEM education, careers, and their increasingly diverse practitioners.