Numerous researches and data collected in recent years highlight a worrying decline in enrollments in university scientific faculties and an alarming increase in university career interruptions in the same fields. STEAM GAMES: WHAT ARE THEY?

It has in fact been noted that the innate “scientific” curiosity of children, their desire to know and experiment, very strong from 3-4 years of age, visibly diminishes towards the beginning of adolescence. At that point, subjects like science and mathematics start to scare, because they are perceived as foreign and too difficult, abstract and complicated.

For this reason, the leading companies in the field of didactic and educational materials have undertaken a campaign in favor of STEM , an acronym for SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING and MATHEMATICS . Games have been conceived, designed and produced that can accompany children in the world of scientific subjects, without frightening them, indeed captivating their attention and amusing them.

Above all in Europe, however, it is considered fundamental and more constructive that science-based teaching travels hand in hand with humanistic teaching, in order to guarantee children as complete an education as possible.

This is why STEM becomes STEAM : the A of ART is added to this program which includes, in a broad sense, art, literature, dramatization, storytelling, etc …

Lego® Education has launched a new ad hoc product: the STEAM PARK , designed for preschool children and, for this reason, made with Duplo bricks.

It is a real amusement park, an amusement park to be built, populated with characters and animated with lots of fun and… educational stories!

All the attractions present in the STEAM PARK , in fact, are aimed at making the child think about basic principles of scientific subjects or to exercise him in the development of language, in the management of emotionality, in the relationship with others and with what is other than himself. .

Let’s take some examples!

By building a ramp to run the toy cars, the child approaches concepts such as force, gravity, propulsion, friction … He learns that a higher ramp causes a faster descent, as does a heavier toy car or a vehicle that receives a push. A slide with obstacles, on the other hand, or a stop at the end of the stroke slow down or block the cars.

The wheel of fortune , with its colors repeated less frequently, teaches that probability is the measure of how often a particular event can happen, if the same action is repeated over and over . Turning and turning the wheel, therefore, you can initially ask the child to “bet” on the color that will come out: the little ones will perhaps choose their favorite color or the latest one but, slowly, with the help of downloadable cards, yes it can teach them to write down the data, in order to ascertain the frequency with which the most represented color on the wheel appears.

Another series of games makes the STEAM PARK a water park, which brings children closer to the idea of ​​density, weight, buoyancy … By setting up an artificial lake, you can make the boats float but… be careful! What happens if waves are created? What if you load the boat too much? Would it float the same, even if it were made of another material?

And again: how do the gears work? How does a carousel move? Why do several nearby merry-go-rounds run in sync? Trying to answer these questions and building his own carousel, the child learns that a gear is a rotating part of a machine, equipped with teeth capable of interlocking with those of another gear , thus creating a torsional force that generates a rotating movement. .

In addition, in the playground you can set up a theater , where the children have fun making the various characters act. The unbridled imagination of the little ones means that always different stories are invented for each of the protagonists: asking them to tell them, perhaps in public, helps them to overcome shyness, to develop logical and chronological thinking and to enrich their vocabulary.

Not only that: Lego® Education specifically studies different figures to be inserted between the characters, to ensure that the child interfaces with different situations and people, identifies with them and can feel understanding, without prejudice. This is how children of all ethnic groups, people in wheelchairs, adults who carry out various jobs and the elderly meet in the park.

Furthermore, all editing requires communication and cooperation skills between several children, who thus develop a specific vocabulary, learn to relate to each other in a constructive and collaborative way and begin to develop transversal skills such as team building, problem solving, etc …

The incredible richness of the Lego® Education Steam Park box is enhanced by the possibility of downloading, for free, preparatory material for the various activities, a user guide and various suggestions for experiments and games that are always new!