Welcome!
We are in the process of accepting submissions to STEAM Fest 2020
Macaulay STEAM Festival is a student event featuring critical inquiry in the arts and sciences, with informal presentations of final semester projects for the Arts in New York City (first year students) and Science Forward (sophomores) seminars. This event gives students in the two seminars a chance to meet one another and explore the work that they are doing in their seminars. For many, this will be one of their first opportunities to share work publicly, and may even mark the beginning of a lifelong calling! The event fosters community across Macaulay campuses—which are eight campuses located throughout the five boroughs of New York City—and encourages the development of intellectual and social relationships throughout the student body. According to a student who participated in the 2017 STEAM Festival, “I would say that it was a great endeavor in bringing together students of all campuses and of different years with different works to present.”
This year, the STEAM festival will be entirely online. Class projects from seminars 1 and 3 across all of Macaulay’s campuses are hosted together on this site, and a number of guides are available to show you how to navigate and engage with these materials. Rather than an online adaptation of an in-person event, this is an innovative online, asynchronous common event intended to give students an opportunity to share work with one another and the greater public while respecting public safety guidelines during the COVID19 pandemic.
Our guides feature possible plans for incorporating the STEAM festival into seminar 1 and seminar 3 classrooms. The guides also show users how to browse through this site on their own, without any follow-up or additional activities, in order to engage with what students have produced in their arts and sciences seminars during this time of remote-learning. In the past students have researched the relationship between zip codes and greenspaces in New York City in seminar 3 and created videos or interactive sculptures in seminar 1. Students continue to produce thoughtful, public-facing projects and we are delighted to be able to share this work.
Why STEAM and not STEM?
Macaulay has organized common events for each seminar since the inception of the college in 2001. Recently, this organization was modified in order to draw out the connections, relationships, and crosscurrents among the arts and sciences. Many people recognize the acronym STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, but fewer recognize STEAM, which adds an A to the acronym for the Arts. In addition to the intellectual possibilities that a crossover event between seminars 1 and 3 offers, the STEAM common event permits students in year two to reflect about their previous year in seminar 1, and gives first year students a chance to look at projects that they themselves will work towards in the upcoming year.
