For 15 years, Los Altos High School’s annual STEAM Week didn’t include the “A” — art. Now, six years after its addition, it’s become an integral part of the event.
In this fall’s STEAM Week, more than 35% of the presentations showcased creativity in one way or another, and 50% of these talks incorporated it interdisciplinary.
“The mission statement we inherited is not just to give cool talks to the kids who already know what they want to pursue,” parent organizer Kara Calhoun said. “It’s really for kids to realize that these disciplines [of STEM and art] can help you, no matter what your career is.”
It’s all an effort from the organizing committee — including head organizer Stephen Hine and parent volunteers — to balance STEM and art to highlight the importance of creativity in students’ future careers, in spite of the stigma still surrounding it.
“For a long time, STEAM Week was like, ‘You must do physics, you must do chemistry,’” Hine said. “These are really great, powerful topics, but you can’t actually just make products like that. You can’t progress society and technology without design.”
Hine first joined the organizing team eight years ago, when the event was exclusively STEM. But after two years, Hine pushed for the addition of arts.
This change faced community pushback for several years, which Hine attributed to LAHS’ academically rigorous nature. Hine said this was especially seen in the STEM Week student survey responses that questioned how art was necessary in STEM.
“We had some comments that were like, ‘Why are you doing that? [Art] is not related to academics. Why is it included?’” Hine said.
Now, even six years into the addition of the arts, some of those feelings have not changed.
“There’s a prevailing sentiment that science and technology jobs are more stable, that somehow art is this slight flight of fancy,” STEAM Week speaker Dickon Isaacs said. “But you really can pick art over science. Listen to your heart and stand up for it. It doesn’t matter if the world tells you it’s lucrative or not.”
Isaacs, an industrial designer, said the profession takes more into consideration and affects more than people realize. Since materials don’t just exist in a vacuum, it is important to take into account both aesthetics and practicality when designing, otherwise products won’t be usable in real life. He believes that the best designs come down to creativity and thinking outside of the box.
“If we can tap into that creativity and then approach the challenges of designing products with a different lens, you end up with these breakthrough products and experiences,” Isaacs said.
Ultimately, Isaacs said being both artistically creative and scientific is a strength. This is what the STEAM Week organizing committee aims to demonstrate every year: STEM and art are not necessarily opposing ideas, but rather need to be balanced.
“We’re trying to highlight that all of these topics have to come together,” parent organizer Dora Yuen said. “You can’t have just science, or just art. They’re mixed together and you can’t separate them.”
