What did Albert Einstein say about imagination?
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” -Albert Einstein, What Life Means to Einstein (1929)
While conducting our STEAM’s classes, one thing is noticeable, imagination helps our children wonder why and what a project is built for. Often, we raise the children curiosity on imagining how is their creation going to be used – “Purpose is being imagined”. Imagination towards the purpose helps the children to better apply design thinking in their initial creation stages – started with Empathise, Define (the problem) and Ideate. As the subconscious builds on the thoughts, decisions and ideas, it leads to every beginning of great creations from our children. Besides, research too shows that the lives of great entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors, are tied to their dreamed imagination, a visual reality to create, but the factor behind their remarkable persistent result, is often tied to their believe in the purpose.
The great entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors are who they are today because they worked on their imagination. It’s their process of creation, prototype and testing that finally transformed a creative visualization that they developed in mind to a tangible outcome of their ‘inside picture’ (a solid mental picture of what they wanted to achieve). Although the power of imagination helps us to visualize things that does not exist (as yet), forming an image or an experience before it becomes a physical reality, the inherent power of all human beings cannot be developed to a higher level if imagination is not being worked on. To put it simply, imagination will not sustain (or will fade away) without a work in progress.
Take a step and recall, think for a moment, we all are who are today because a future that we have painted in our mind in a cycle of time of past’s imagination. By the same logic, a child’s imagination will only blossom if he or she gets to work on his or hers creation in the mind. It’s important to keep the imagination running and generate a faith in them, believing they can create. The ability to create and make would keep its momentum if children is directly involved in producing their innovative products, which makes them becoming more confident in their abilities, enabling them to form more ideas and create it by practice in any given circumstances.
In 2019, our integrated STEM and STEAM education programs are redesigned towards adaptive learning and applied knowledge. We run STEAM integration in all our syllabus. Even for our science experiments, we integrate technology into science so that students have wider scope of understanding on the linkage and applied knowledge in practical.
1. Science Lab – Creative Science
2. Makers Lab – Bring Home DIY Robots
3. Makers Lab – Electronics Innovation
4. Makers Lab – 3D (Design Thinking)
5. Makers Lab – Programming (Applied Knowledge)6. Adaptive Learning for Advance Maker
Applied knowledge & skills fosters creativity and innovation. We believe that idea is everywhere and anytime. Often imagination births from our daily lives, through the environment that we interact and from our play. Thus we encourage the use of reuse / recycle items in our collection. The accessibility of resources is important to get the work started and believing resources is aplenty if we could just go gather.
Imagination is an important survival trait, especially for young children to spend more of those early years of plenty chasing imaginary prey. If only we let our children to touch their imagination, and subsequently create it with their skills, the future Makers can enlarge their Power of Imagination to achieve amazing things.
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