BUILDING IMAGINATION
THINK BIG
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Education should be incredible.
It should nurture children's confidence, expand their horizons of what is possible, fill them with excitement, help them to feel connected to their peers, nurture their skills and creativity, help them find where their aptitudes and passions meet, and fundamentally, it should make them smile. Over the past three years we’ve had the pleasure of working with thousands of children, exploring their passions and striving to do as much of this as possible.
We started with a single group of 16 children and a large box of lego. We’ve since worked with over 3000 students, building and coding robots, designing 3D worlds, 3D modelling, 3D printing, utilising virtual and augmented reality, and also remembering to at times return to just a box of building blocks and the joys of our imaginations.
Our journey so far has brought engineers, coders and architects, artists and into the classroom.
Children have pleaded with us to come and do their birthday party’s (which we’ve relencted to) and schools have invited us in to talk to their students and staff.
It’s been an amazing journey so far… but we’re only just getting started.
We plan to continue doing what we do in the classroom each and every week but also feel it’s time to take what we’ve learned and create something that can aid students and educators not just in the classrooms in our own city, but in cities, suburbs, classrooms and bedrooms around the globe.
From a single classroom of children, to hundreds and then thousands of children, we now want to inspire hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of young minds.
Children love to learn
They want to develop their skills, grow their knowledge and become the best they possibly can be. If you watch a young child, they are filled with an innate hunger to explore the world around them. From taking their first steps, to climbing, building and having an imagination that leaves most adults in awe.
Go and speak to 100 children and ask them about their education or their time at school. An astounding report being bored. If children are finding their education boring, something is going horribly wrong. This is not the fault of teachers, they are heavily overstretched and in many ways their hands are tied. They are under pressure to deliver a curriculum that is not inspiring many children and in lots of areas heavily outdated. Students are still being taught and heavily tested on their ability to remember and regurgitate facts.
We can only begin to speculate on what the world of work might look like by the time today's children enter the workforce. One thing we can be certain of, being able to regurgitate facts isn’t going to be what serves them. Being able to problem solve, collaborate and think big, while having the confidence to try things out and strive for the seemingly impossible is.
Yes children need to develop language so they can express themselves and yes it’s great if they can have a good grounding of mathematics, it’s also wonderful if they take an interest in the sciences and history but it’s time we review the way we teach some of these things and we definitely need to give more weight to nurturing their inherent desire to express themselves and their ideas and explore their desire to create.
Through harnessing the tools and technology that is available we can better tailor students' time spent at desks, giving them a more personalised education while providing them opportunities to explore their passions and aptitudes. We can make time spent at desks way more effective, leaving more time for running around outside and exploring and learning everything there is to be gained from being out in the big wide world.
We plan to create a learning platform that supports students, teachers and parents to give children an education that is a million miles from ‘being bored’.
We’d like to invite you along for the ride.
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As amazing as any single tool or piece of software may be, large scale ambitious projects often require a range of skills and ways of realising ideas. We believe children should be getting opportunities to explore as many of these as possible. From doing a drawing, turning it into a 3D model, loading their model into a virtual world, coding their world into an interactive game, creating an animation and then building a website to show the rest of the world what they’ve made. We are going to build a platform that supports students to Think Big.
Whatever your background, whether that be an educator, programmer, engineer, architect, artist, actor or parent, if this resonates with you and you’d be interested in being a part of it, we’d love to hear from you.