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                    STEM, STEAM and Machine Learning

Anyone who is somewhat up to date on education buzzwords is surely familiar with STEM=Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. There is a recent twist on STEM: STEAM.  STEAM is STEM with the arts (A) injected into the mix. Its all the rage. To see this, all one needs to do is go to the Google news tab and search on "Steam Education". On any given day, articles from local newspapers from all over the country reporting that the local school district is either discussing how to fund a STEAM program, starting a STEAM program or reporting on the ongoing success of a STEAM program that has been in place for a year or two. The link below will take you to an article from Science Magazine that discusses the need for art in STEM. Note that the article has its own version of the  acronym (STEMM).  Click here to see the article.

It seems to me that a great way to integrate math and the arts would be through machine learning. For example, Natural Language Processing can be used to classify literary styles. Random Forests can be used to classify art and music. With that in mind, I have been working on a project that classifies music using the machine learning technique called RandomForest. The link to that project is here.


Maybe a place like the bootcamp General Assembly could put together a short course for math, art science and language art teachers to provide them with the skills to bring machine learning concepts into a high school or
a middle school curriculum.   BTW, I have a degree in secondary math ed. I also taught 9th grade algebra for a year. Based on my experience, there is a great need to make mathematics relevant to students in high school. Machine learning has the potential to show students how math can be used on the data (video, images and music) they are immersed in.     

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