Menntaskóli Borgarfjarðar Becomes First Upper Secondary School To Implement STEAM Courses

Menntaskóli Borgarfjarðar recently received a grant from the Development Fund for Study Materials to offer a special “STEAM” course, making it the first upper secondary school in the country to do so.

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The “STEAM” courses are part of a larger development project at the school called “education for the jobs of the future,” which will focus on the five components of STEAM: science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.

Bragi Þór Svavarsson, headmaster of Menntaskóli Borgarfjörður, told Vísir that the working group’s proposals include several things.

“We are going to build a future studio called Kvika, which is similar to FabLab. There will also be a sound and video studio. So one of the reasons is that we teach life studies here, which are what I call life skills on steroids. There are five credits that all students take as we go through such “theme based” projects every semester that range from finance to sex education and include factors such as health and sustainability,” Bragi says.

Three STEAM courses will be offered and they will be compulsory in each study program. The STEAM courses are “project-oriented teaching where students receive such basic guidance in everything related to technology, creativity, engineering, mathematics, and all that,” says Bragi.

The teaching will then be based on courses that are in the first, second, and third stages and end with the students creating their own projects. Students are expected to use all the basic elements of “STEAM” and mix them together. Bragi says the school’s approach is completely different from what has already been done in other schools.

“We are simply creating three phases where this is specifically addressed, where the integration of these disciplines into realistic projects and daily life, daily life of mathematics, daily life of art, daily life of engineering is specifically demonstrated,” says Bragi.