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16 The Rubik's Cube: A Unique Twist in STEAM Gifted Education
The Rubik’s Cube is a puzzle that has the potential to increase accessibility in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by incorporating art into these other subjects. The program “You CAN Do The Rubik’s Cube” serves as a resource for educators across the United States to bring art into the STEM topics to create “STEAM.” In addition to the mosaics that can be constructed using templates on the website, artwork can be made with computer programs and apps which pixelate images for designing the Rubik’s Cube mosaics. Various activities and lessons created using the Rubik’s Cube can provide extensions for educators seeking to enrich their gifted students’ learning.
Over the course of two, five-week math electives, the author was able to arrange a small-scale, qualitative study which informally observed the motivation and engagement of students. During this period, it was very apparent that students who may not have been identified as “gifted” appeared to demonstrate those characteristics, as they were able to immerse themselves in the new challenge of building mosaics as a team within the classroom environment. Due to the small sample size of these observations, however, it would be necessary to expand upon this research by addressing larger groups of students, as well as groups with more diverse backgrounds to confidently assess the effectiveness of the Rubik’s Cube with gifted students.
The Rubik’s Cube requires a productive struggle in order to solve it. Even for gifted students, discipline and patience are traits that can develop more over time with consistent exposure to the Rubik’s Cube. Using a developed program with a curriculum that provides supplementary content with the Rubik’s Cube as a guiding component, it may be possible for educators to transform mathematics classes to encourage more students--particularly gifted ones--to pursue STEM subjects. It is the belief of the author that more teachers ought to integrate the Rubik’s Cube within their lesson planning to provide some much-needed hands-on experiences in the mathematics classroom. Doing this might rekindle a passion within students and remind them of the various ways that creativity can be found within the subjects of math and science.
This proposal is motivated by the current topic of the Gifted and Talented International Special Issue focusing on creativity. The Rubik’s Cube incites curiosity among all who attempt to solve it and can be utilized to enhance any gifted program.