Over the summer, I had the honor and pleasure to help helm the innagural Duke STEAMy Summer Challenge. The STEAMy Summer Challenge was a preliminary event designed to introduce the advent of the Duke STEAM Challenge initiative and to offer students a chance to put STEAM principles to work to create a STEAMy promotional video touting the 'transformative potential' of STEAM collaboration.
What is STEAM? STEAM happens when the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields are (re)infused with scholarship and thinking from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. STEAM advocates, prime among them our own Cathy N. Davidson, believe that "the challenging questions of the 21st century can only be answered through the integrated efforts of all disciplines working together." Our Duke STEAMy Summer Challenge invited Duke students to consider how the STEAM disciplines might work - and are currently working - together to address real world problems and pose innovative solutions. Duke graduate, undergraduate, and professional students from all fields and backgrounds submitted to our challenge, contributing STEAMy 2-minute videos that covered topics ranging from oceanic ecology to interactive digital art. After careful deliberation, we narrowed the submissions to our top 5 (fantastic) favorites and posted those to our Facebook page for interactive, public voting. Our team of professionals then had the difficult task of choosing the grand prize winner (who took home a generous prize of $1,000!).
And the winner was...
DukeToday profiled our winner and her story is one worth sharing: Mixing Arts and Science: One Student's Story