[somewhereoutth]

> you do you

What? Such an asinine statement.

Clearly anything that involves shaping the physical world will have the hard sciences as its foundation. There is a sort of reverse snobbery going on here - 'too cool for school', it is unfortunate to see.

[bsder]

STEM means "science, technology, engineering and math". And, in fact, is almost always about a degree in the aforementioned areas as it was coined by the NSF in 2001.

You can fool yourself and try to appropriate the acronym STEM for whatever definition you please in service of whatever goal you wish; however, the US government is quite clear as to what a STEM job or degree is. I guarantee that welders, woodworkers, etc. will not be granted a STEM visa to the US.

[somewhereoutth]

In the context of this discussion I was using STEM in the most general sense, i.e. maker spaces tend to be more STEM or craft and technology orientated, as opposed to e.g. literature, social sciences, etc. That should be clear to most I feel - informal learning environments don't provide degrees (almost by definition), so the rigorous usage of the term does not apply.