In this article I will present the STEAM concerns of the students in our high school. These activities took place mostly within the eTwinning “Math travellers” project. The main theme was Art and Real Life. The materials were uploaded on the site specially created for this event “STEAM for ALL 2022“.

Students use knowledge of mathematics, economics, art education, IT, English to complete 3 tasks:

1. Perform a simple statistical analysis of the M&M color frequency from a 40 gram bag.

a) They will sort the candies by color and record their absolute frequencies.

b) They will graphically represent the frequencies of colors using Microsoft Excel, calculate percentages, weighted arithmetic averages and be able to make predictions about the color composition of other packages

2. Using M&M candies to calculate sums of natural numbers, namely the sum of Gauss S = 1 + 2 + 3 + … + n and the sum of odd natural numbers S = 1 + 3 + 5 + … + 2n-1

3. Using candy to create drawings, figurines (on the occasion of the Easter holidays)

The activity took place within the eTwinning “Math Travelers” project

5th grade students from Jean Monnet High School participated.

The objectives of the activities carried out are:

• increase students interest in STE(A)M subjects

• develop students problem solving skills

• improve students foreign language skills 

• improve students science skills 

• improve students art skills

• to create an enjoyable learning environment at school

• integrate STEM to give students the confidence to explore STEM topic

Experimental Procedure

In the classroom: in the first stage, groups of 2-3 students counted the candies for each color and the total number of candies in a package. Then they filled in the table on the math notebooks. On each row, they calculated the total number of candies, by color, as well as the total number of candies. As they went to the computer lab in the second hour, the students completed two more interesting tasks; they deduced the calculation formulas for the Gaussian sum as well as for the sum of the odd natural numbers using the arrangement of the candies in the form of a rectangle or a square, as in the following images. It was an unexpected discovery, but a pleasant one for everyone. At the end of the first hour, they played forming different flowers, figurines with the help of M & M’s candies. Then in the lab, they opened an excel sheet, filled out a similar table, and then inserted a column chart. They also calculated the average of the results per class and made comparisons with the results of the groups. It is very important that students have learned to use the Excel program. They really enjoyed working with it. The modeling they did proves that they were able to acquire IT skills in addition to math. Many of them worked in English, developing their communication skills. It was a creative activity, much loved by the students.

https://sites.google.com/view/steam-jean-monnet/5-grade/experiments

On April 14, 2022, in the STEAM video conference, held with the partners of the eTwinning Math Travelers project, the students presented all the experiments on the specially created site. The M & M’s Candy experiment of 5th grade students was much appreciated by colleagues from other countries.