Creative Learning Studio

The Creative Learning Studio is the innovation hub for the UVU School of Education, focused on promoting equity and engagement in STEM education through pre-service teacher education, professional learning for in-service teachers, curriculum development, and a lending library of STEM resources.

How does the Creative Learning Studio support STEM?

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, but STEM is about much more than just learning these subjects. STEM represents ways of thinking about learning and problems that benefit all children, even if they don't want to grow up to be scientists.

However, we also believe that every child deserves the opportunity to pursue education and a career in STEM fields, and this is not currently a reality. This is why we are so passionate about sharing STEM and integrative practices with all teachers and students. Yes, STEM careers are in high demand and people with STEM careers make more money than those in many other fields, but to us it's all about ensuring that every child — no matter where they live, how much money they have, how much education their parents have, the color of their skin, or the languages they speak — gets to experience STEM in a way that is meaningful and motivating.

We also believe that STEM should not replace subjects such as language arts, social studies, or the visual and performing arts. Rather, there is tremendous potential to integrate STEM with these subjects using transformative pedagogies to help students develop those powerful STEM thinking skills while seeing how STEM can allow them to better express themselves, understand the past, and contribute to the world.

Qobo snail robot on a track

Integrative Practices

These integrative practices include interdisciplinary approaches to:

STEM fields
Educational technology
Robotics
Computer Science
Transformative pedagogies
Project-based learning
Authentic assessment

Goals

These integrative practices include interdisciplinary approaches to:

Increase pre- and in-service teachers' awareness of integrative practices
Increase per- and in-service teachers' self-efficacy in and attitudes toward integrative practices, particularly with regard to the use of technology, robotics, and coding across the curriculum
Increase K-12 students' exposure to technology, robotics, and coding.
Increase K-12 students' self-efficacies in and attitudes toward STEM subjects, technology, robotics, and coding.