Chinese Tea Culture as Method in STEAM Education

Overview

The seminar discusses ways of using Chinese tea culture as the theme to promote STEAM education. Thanks to the speaker’s background as a Chinese tea practitioner, the speaker led the student to develop a ‘Meta-tea’ app to illustrate how app- and ai- application are combined to articulate Technology, Science, Mathematics and Engineering with tea arts to inspire new STEAM pedagogy. In turn, this helps promote the development of Chinese tea culture. Interestingly, the speaker finds that students are very interested in traditional tea culture, as discovered in the gifted education, school and public exhibition, as well as cross-cultural activities.　

Through the ‘Meta-tea’ app, their horizon and cultural intelligence in applying technology to Arts education are broadened, by learning how to use tea as the theme and MIT App Inventor 2 to design a mobile app to teach students ways of brewing a perfect cup of tea. Students are asked to create their database and integrate AI chatbot to maximise the usage of science and technology in developing arts. Besides, the app also connects with the tea atomiser on the tea stall to train students how to appreciate tea with colour and smell of tea. Furthermore, voxel art and animation are added to attract students’ attention. All in all, the ‘Meta-tea’ has showcased how maker education of tea can be promoted to students and tea lovers.

Participants of this seminar will understand:
1. how to use tea culture as the theme to promote STEAM education;
2. how to adopt Maker education in promoting traditional tea culture at school and in the academia; and
3. how to use tea to facilitate cross-cultural interactions and develop cultural intelligence.