HOW IT WORKS

Idea Studio is a hands-on, playful project incubator, driven by the learners’ own curiosity and creativity. It’s grounded in principles of creative inquiry learning, design thinking, and entrepreneurship. Kind of like the on-the-job learning we do as adults, without the added pressure of needing a job.

Kids bring the ideas, we guide them through a process to bring those ideas to life.

Idea Studio runs once a week after school during term, or as a school holiday sprint that gives learners a grounding in the rapid, iterative learning processes common across industry innovation programs “in the real world.” If they have an idea burning a hole in their pocket, they can put it into practice. If not, we’ll challenge them with some starting points. Our coached, hands-on learning process will help them refine and develop their idea to a “good enough” starting point to begin prototyping, refinement, and iteration.

They’ll build things, they’ll connect ideas. If their project calls for it, they might assemble some code.

They’ll use some low-tech and high-tech (think cardboard and sewing to laser cutting and 3D printing) making techniques, and we’ll delve into electronics and physical computing with introductory microcontrollers (think sensors, lights, motors, and boards like the BBC micro:bit)…

but it’s not about that.

It’s about creative confidence.

It’s about indulging and encouraging curiosity.

It’s about getting things wrong before you can get them right.

It’s about trusting young learners with big ideas.

It’s about your kids getting to know themselves as learners.

If we do these things well, we can rely on the ideas that schools commonly call STEM to come up on their own.