Reimagine Education is an international competition, organized by QS and Wharton Business School. It rewards innovative initiatives aimed at enhancing student learning outcomes & employability. Annually, the competition is concluded by a global conference for all those seeking to shape the future of education: https://www.reimagine-education.com/
The Center for Curiosity is an award sponsor for Reimagine Education. It’s our honor to support the Cultivating Curiosity Award annually. This year, 2018, we are happy to reward and recognize the winners:
MATHIGON
Gold Award Winner
Mathigon is an online platform for middle and high school mathematics. It combines an innovative new curriculum with cutting-edge technology, to make mathematics more engaging than ever before. Our unique content format allows student to actively “explore and discover” – not just consume information like they would in a video or textbook. Over time, we can seamlessly adapt and personalise the content, while a virtual tutor provides real-time help and feedback. Using countless interactive explorations, animations and games, Mathigon can teach problem solving and creativity. A captivating narrative provides context for abstract ideas, and lets the content come alive.
21 DAYS: THE INNOVATION QUEST GRENOBLE ÉCOLE DE MANAGEMENT
Silver Award Winner
21 Days is designed as a serious game to promote awareness and practices of innovating with limited resources. It exhibits in a form of a tangible game, as well as an online variation. Playing the game day after day, it distributes knowledge about innovation and provides players a hands-on experience. It lasts for 21 days, which is considered as the minimal time to develop a behavioral routine. Executive and Higher Education students will play their 21-day quest on a mysterious island. They will be given a precious mission box with 21 tubes and a secret diary… http://www.21daysquest.com/
AL BAIRAQ QATAR UNIVERSITY
Bronze Award Winner
Education, still dependent on traditional methods of indoctrination and ‘spoon feeding’, is unilateral (one-sided learning) from employing different teaching tools to delivering the disciplinary content. Unfortunately, schools have been shielding overly orchestrated, overly scrutinized, and extremely controlled students and teachers. Ahmed was intellectually reaching out to the swirling leaves to perceive with his hands, ignoring his teacher’s artistic illustration of a green leaf on the whiteboard to transmit information on photosynthesis. Well, why is he constrained to visually and palpably explore the phenomenon while it is possible to? This scenario tends to nurture a potentially curious child into a passive and sedentary recipient. If the world is not separated to educational or non-educational, the child wants to learn everything. They make learning as an integral and organic part of their learning. Instructor centered teaching promotes rote learning – thereby nullifying curiosity in students leading to a decline in problem –solving and critical thinking skills. Creativity nurtured through hands on experience along with curiosity, agility, critical thinking and problem solving are among the key techniques that could change this landscape promising a better tomorrow of employability for the next generation. Science is a process of exploration and innovation that roots from the basic inquiry and stems through application to evaluation. Scientific inquiry is an efficient tool to vitalize curiosity. Hence, we employ scientific workshops in our STEM pedagogy. The structure of our program is designed as follows;
1- STIMULATING CURIOSITY: We make a show to flare up curiosity through a scientific experiment.
2- ASK: Students pop up quality questions; ‘why’, ‘what if’ and ‘how’ and research and hunt to note their findings.
3- HANDS ON EXPERIENCE: They perform technical experiments to gain an advantage in scientific knowledge.
4 – MOCK DESIGN PROJECT: Apply their acquired knowledge by employing in an already designed project to verse them on the steps to an independently design a project.
5- INSPIRE: convert the acquired knowledge into a real-life application (an independent design project) and it follows the order; A: brainstorm on a real-life problem, B: decision-making, C: planning and designing, D: creation (real-working prototypes) and
6- EVALUATION: these working prototypes are presented to community leaders thereby subjecting the students in the real world realizations. This whole process has succeeded in embedding curiosity in each student resulting in an upgraded logical performance.