Back To School: New Beginnings with Innovation and Creativity

The summer break is over and the school year is anew - it’s definitely exciting to be with classmates to enjoy classroom cheer and shenanigans again. A new school year means more learning and growth for students - a time to reconnect with your curious self and a fresh mind following what must have been a thrilling and relaxing summer break for everyone. With this curiosity, it's important for us to realize that we should hone young minds to be innovative and creative considering everything that's happened over the course of the year.

It's also interesting to notice a commonality in education across the world in recent times is the integration of STEM learning into the regular school curricula. Now in the third year following the COVID-19 outbreak, dismal warnings about climate change, and other facets of issues crippling our societies, this integration can’t come at a better time. The only thing students need to do is keep an open mind to learning what the STEM field has to offer and perhaps consider pursuing a future in it.?

With a STEM curriculum, our children push the frontiers at an early age to be innovative and creative in designing or finding solutions to common-day or complex problems they face. The point of STEM education is to go beyond just teaching theories and having students apply them to their daily lives. Being an invigorating field, children develop the in-demand knowledge and skills to thrive in today’s world. It helps them communicate and collaborate with each other through various hands-on activities to develop design thinking and ethical reasoning skills as learned skills.

It’s also crucial that we understand that STEM isn’t only in relation to STEM careers but the skills are transferable and can be applied across the entire school curriculum. For example, the arts are made possible due to STEM as we use technology to make different tools like paintbrushes, paint, and canvases, or performing arts use technology for the design and construction of sets, costumes, and acoustical panels. People should see such a connection between STEM and other subjects in order to develop a students’ broader understanding of the way the world works. Through STEM education, children will learn the concept of critical and creative thinking by making them understand problems, create solutions, test and iterate on those solutions, and once perfected, share them with the world.?

Many schools in the U.S. have already begun engaging their students, from kindergarten and above, in new learning spaces including robots and 3D virtual reality to expose them to the STEM field. They learn skills such as coding and robotics all the way to using 3D virtual reality to understand human anatomy and space science. Studies show that exposure to the STEM field from a young age harbors an interest in young children and maybe even pursue a career within it. Students create, build, and remain curious, which should be the goal of such programs. The field also sparks opportunities for children from all walks of life to learn and explore the STEM field in a welcoming and creative environment.

Social NGOs, like us at Ground Z, must strive to create platforms and programs to introduce children to the STEM field from a young age. This exposure has proven to be super beneficial in sparking an interest in the field without any discrimination against gender, race, or status. At Ground Z, our gamified pocket-sized labs will aim to shape world-class innovators in order to make innovation accessible and affordable for everyone, thereby boosting innovation equality.?

As our world continues to face several challenges and destructive issues, we need our youth to be prepared to solve them. They can only achieve that innovative and creative thinking if we ensure to provide them with the means and tools to explore and solve day-to-day problems on a regular basis from a young age in school. By providing such an extensive platform for STEM learning to curious and determined children, they can develop a keen interest in the field alongside building a strong foundation of in-demand skills to solve global problems in the future. This way, with critical thinking and problem-solving attitudes, our children can create a unique world they want for themselves and our global community.

Written by Yuvika Bhatia, Content Strategist at Ground Z.?