TIFR’s Homi Bhabha Centre launches online series integrating arts with STEM – Times of India

MUMBAI: ‘The most exciting things today are happening at the boundaries of traditional branches of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and arts.’ Building on this idea, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), the national centre of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, has launched an online series called the STEAMboat. The initiative is aimed at integrating arts with STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), to promote creative and critical thinking and to recognise the interdisciplinary nature of these subjects.

“Globally, there’s an increasing emphasis on looking at STEM along with arts. Both arts and science, after all, are creative endeavours. You are exploring the creativity of the human mind, whether it is done through music, painting or dance form or through science and experiments. In today’s world, you need skills from both sides,” said Arnab Bhattacharya, centre director, HBCSE. While the concept of STEAM has become popular in the west, in India it is yet to catch up, he said. “The idea is to break down the artificial barriers that we have between the ‘sciency’ and the ‘arty’ subjects,” he added.

STEAMboat will comprise talks, animated videos in multiple languages, exploring science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics and their intersections. The first talk on November 14 on ‘The Superb Spider’s Super Silk’ delivered by Suravi Kalita delved into spiderman movies, to the biology of how it works, to properties of spider silk to the artwork that people make using it. It also looked at the possibility of artificially engineering different creatures to make the same molecules that are in spider silk and make use of it in textiles. “It goes beyond a talk looking at only the pure science aspect,” said Bhattacharya. In the pipeline are talks that will explore the artistic pattern in magic squares and also the hidden science behind the clever crow fable.

The talks will be scheduled on the second Sunday of every month and the topics will be picked by the HBCSE community. It could range from environmental issues to design to standard science and math education. The team will also be making shorter videos in multiple languages, starting with Hindi and Marathi in the initial days. The details of these sessions and the videos will be made available on steamboat.hbcse.tifr.res.in.