“Innovativity” is a coined word by Howmights. This holds a similar concept as creativity.
innovativity
Discovering, creating, and achieving.
What should we do to bring up children’s creativity? Drawing pictures and building up skills is one thing, but we think it differently. Howmights School consider the “creativity that will be required in the future” is “innovativity”.
innovativity
“Creativity” means bringing about new ideas. On the other hand, “innovativity” signifies the whole process of achieving the ideas that was brought from “creativity”. It is a word that includes stubbornness and flexibility in discovering issues, creating new ideas, teamwork, and leaderships.
As a result of development of artificial intelligence and robot technologies, computer robots will probably take place jobs which operational efficiencies under existing rules are pursued. Nevertheless, it is considerably difficult for computers to create “something completely new”, and those will surely remain to be a task for human side. Therefore, we think innovativity becomes important for the children to play active part in the future society.
Through design thinking, projects, and activities with the team, children learn teamwork and achievement through creating unique ideas and putting them into reality.
We put our main focus on “not fearing failures” since Japanese children tend to lose its attitude as they grow up. Children learn as they experience trial and error, and by making mistakes.
Design Thinking
At Howmights School, we incorporate the idea of design thinking to heighten the ability of children’s innovativity.
Design thinking is a new method to come up with new innovations, for people who is not a professional designer, but with the idea like a designer. This method was adapted at a design consulting company known as IDEO in the United States, and they have achieved a great success in designing layout of many innovative products such as ipod, iphone of Apple Inc., toys, and education facilities. Recently in the educational field such as Stanford University d.school is starting to adopt the idea of design thinking. Nueva School in California known as a school which was introduced in a book called EQ has started design thinking program as well.
Design thinking focus on human emotions, and discovering issues and solving out solutions. Through its process, children learn sympathy, effort-making, communication, teamwork, leadership, and patience.
STEM
There is no “science“class in our curriculum for lower grades. Howmights School think STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) including “science” is the important subject to develop children’s innovativity, therefore, we take plenty of time for them. These are the classes we offer:
- innovation class
- programming class
- research class
- project class
- art class
We emphasize in innovation class which is an original curriculum at our school. Here the children are given problems without any hint or instruction. We make them think by themselves to solve through trial and effort.
Resources
Most Likely to Succeed Preparing Our Kids for The Innovation Era PRAISE FOR MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED
Written by Tony Wagner, Japanese version translated by Asako Fujiwara
Let the children filled with curiosity and challenging spirit, think by themselves and create new things with originality—This book offers parents and educators a crucial guide to giving best for their children to bring up innovation ability in various fields.
TED Talk Ken Robinson—How Schools Kill Creativity
Ken Robinson is building the educational system that will grow into creativity. (Not growing out of it.) His style is full of entertainment and appeals something that stings our hearts and mind.