Stem subjects face the haptic generationthe ischolar

Resumen

Since 2006, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), educational policies, and stakeholders have addressed to the EU recommendations aimed to provide a framework for lifelong learning in the knowledge society. Strategies like "Europe 2020" or "Education and Training 2020" (ET2020), focusing on smart growth through the development of knowledge and innovation (COM, 2010), try to answer the new global challenges that the digital era brings. New concepts like smart specialization, digital competence, or digital citizenship, among others, are keystones to fulfil the labor market skills of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Recent surveys, among nowadays students, evidence high drop-out and repetition rates (OECD, 2016), and their low motivation to join our campuses following the existing methodologies. The gap between what the students expect and what they receive from faculty is nowadays insurmountable because the university model was created, developed, and updated in the pre-haptic era when the Bologna Process for standardization of European higher education was incorporated into the curricula design (2010). Technical Spanish universities, in an effort to meet the needs of the future engineers, are trying to design strategies that incorporate those crucial skills so that its graduates can prosper in a digital working society (OECD, 2019) in the best possible way. Since 2010, the irruption of smartphones and tablets in our households (haptic devices) and normal life has brought a new gesture, the haptic interaction, to our social well-being and to our way of living. Within that interaction there are elements like global connectivity, digital formats, new media literacies, instant communication, interactivity, or personalization that have affected to all members of society no matter the age, including the Haptic Generation children that are, right now, spying and imitating all sort of gestures and behaviors performed around them while developing their personalities. The ethnographic design from a Social Science perspective guides the research conducted in this dissertation confirming that haptic interaction in the hands of early childhood brings possibilities for boosting creativity, English language learning, and expert understanding, among other learning possibilities while using the device at its best capacity for literacy learning (using its in-built features). This capacity arises the research questions of this dissertation. In no time, those children: the iScholars, who have acquired literacy learning with innate haptic gestures since early childhood will be filling our university campuses bringing different learning needs in a new scenario that blends formal, informal, and non-formal educative settings within a broader scope. Having this landscape in view, a new learning scenario, the Learning Atrium is configurated to enable STEM subjects to face the Haptic Generation: the iScholars. The Atrium, like a polyvalent space, offers higher education the possibility to shape the university degrees from a STEHEAM scope that it is believed to meet the 2030 university student's needs in search of scholar knowledge, professional skills, and competencies acquisition.