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Science Stuff: Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM)
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It seems like STEM pops up all over the place. Yes, it’s an acronym that comes from science, technology, engineering and math. Quick note — it used to be SMET, but no one calls it that any more.
Honestly, if it were up to me (it’s obviously not), I would call it MSET because that order makes the most sense. OK, let’s go over these different areas. I’m going to use the SMET order.
Science
I think I mostly described the nature of science in this previous post, but here is my super short answer:
- Science is the process of building models based on experimental evidence.
See, that’s just one line. But what about the different branches of science? OK, I’m going to focus on the natural sciences — but there’s also social science, political science and even things like history. Yes, history is basically just like science. They collect evidence (like reports, artifacts, eye witness accounts) and use that to build a model of what actually happened in some historical event.
But let’s focus on the natural sciences. These focus on how nature works. The natural sciences can be further split into physical science and life science. Life science deal with stuff that is also alive (that seems obvious from the title) — that means…