Round Rock ISD will collaborate with the City of Round Rock Arts and Culture, Museo Natal Casa Picasso and the Texas European Foundation in the Picasso STEAM Challenge, an initiative for student artists focused on art, design and technology.

Round Rock ISD Fine Arts Director of Visual Arts, Tim Lowke, said he’s excited to start this collaborative STEAM Challenge. 

“Our faculty is excited about the current work with the Texas European Foundation, City of Round Rock Arts and Culture, along with Museo Casa Natal Picasso centered around visual arts,” he said. “The Picasso STEAM Challenge leverages project-based learning for real-world application and connects students with meaningful implementation of Bond 2024 resources. We look forward to the creative solutions students will design and eventually race as a result of the Challenge.”  

Round Rock ISD serves roughly 29,000 students across the district in visual arts. To ensure the competition is conducted with fidelity and within a scope that can be maintained in this program's first year, specific grades were selected to participate based on the skills taught at those grades and levels. The groups invited to take part in this challenge are students from fourth-grade art, middle school Art Two and high school Art One. Fine arts department leads worked through selecting grade levels that could align with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), skill sets and availability.​

Art teachers worked on preparing this collaborative project during their summer Job Alike professional development, where they learned the ins and outs of preparing for the district-provided lessons. 

Zachary Jackson, Round Rock High School art teacher, said, “When I first heard about the challenge, my mind went to past experiences with STEAM. Typically the ‘Art’ in STEAM had been relegated to ‘here, art classes, paint this thing’. The Picasso STEAM Challenge has clearly subverted the tradition of pinning art to mere decoration, and has elevated the role of creativity to the top of the taxonomy, where it belongs!”

One of the main focuses of this district-wide STEAM challenge is to use newly purchased iPads from the 2024 Bond. Before school started, art teachers had the opportunity to learn about Procreate, an iPad application, from an Apple-certified instructor during their Job Alike professional development day.

The lessons span learning the skills and styles, designing a model car, building the model car and then competing in a campus-wide race, with participation-based rewards. The top 20 from each campus will send their designed cars to a city-wide competition. This suggests the possibility of having 1,000 students at the city-level competition if all chosen grade levels across all campuses participate.

Mrs. Scalan, the art teacher from Gattis Elementary School, can’t wait for this opportunity for her students.

“Design thinking and technology are passions of mine that I love integrating into art, and I am so excited about this global partnership that is expanding our students' opportunities beyond the classroom,” Scalan said. “As an art teacher on a Title I campus, I am grateful that this experience of making their own cars is free! I can't wait to see their excitement as they transform the digital drawing they made in Procreate into an actual car that they can race.”

One impact of this partnership is to provide opportunities for students, families, and the broader community to connect with art history. It also provides a new opportunity to connect classroom learning with real-life applications, to see how what is being taught in their art classes can be used in the real world.

There will be other opportunities for engaged connection for students, as the City of Round Rock will host a gallery show at the City Arts Center this fall featuring Picasso artwork from Spain. This is the first of this partnership, with hopes to continue and possibly grow in the future, based on this initial model with Round Rock ISD.

To learn more about the Picasso STEAM Challenge, visit their main webpage. For more information on our Visual Arts programs, visit our fine arts webpage.