CREATE and the art of growth

All of us are born makers and innovators. Just have a conversation with a five-year-old. Their sense of the world has not been solidified or limited by experience. Everything is possible. Our kindergarteners are new to our school and to CREATE. Creating nine kinds of pies with a purple crayon is totally plausible to a five-year-old.

For the past 100+ years, the traditional school system has been about suppressing innovation in favor of standardized knowledge. Students were the output of a system intended to "manufacture" factory workers. "Creative" workers were a problem in a system where every human component was supposed to be interchangeable. Creating learners who could grow independently was simply not part of the plan.

To many people, school is about preparing learners for "21st century jobs." Yet, there is no way that we can know what those jobs are. 10 years ago, I could not have described my job. It didn't exist. It is the heights of hubris and arrogance to think that we know what the jobs of 15 years from now will be.

Failed 3-D print.

So we take a different approach to learning here.

An engineer is somebody who uses their mind to solve problems in real life. Technology is a thing invented via the engineering and design process to solve problems. Our makerspace, CREATE, is where those things come together.

But we're not an engineering principles class. We encourage students to not only define their own techniques, we ask them to define their own goals. CREATE's culture is deliberately built as a safe place for failure — and learning by analyzing those failures. Questions like "Why didn't it do what I want?" and "How can I change it to make it better?" are the background music that indicates learning success.

We can't reliably guess where our students will end-up. So we must provide them not only with the techniques to learn anything, but with the confidence that they can do anything.