We often underestimate young people. We leave the big global problems to adults, disregarding the innate curiosity that drives our young people to understand the world around them. Our schools are all about learning what from material and textbooks and seldom about immersed learning in and from the world we live in.
In response to this, in June 2017, the Kids Can! Innovation Camp was launched in Xavier School - San Juan, Manila, Philippines in the small makeshift makerspace in the grade school. From an inter-after-school-club synergy, the Innovation Camp has become a global collaboration project supported by a global team of educators, who also took the challenge of translating the camp framework into languages such as Polish, Malaysia, Korean, Viet, and Filipino among others.
Big Ideas of Kids Can! Innovation Camp
- The Kids Can! Innovation Camp seeks to provide grade school-middle school students the opportunity to become critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and active agents of change. In order to do this, Kids Can! project incorporates the United Nations Global Goals, also known as the Sustainability Development Goals of 2030, as a guiding tool for the children.
- The project framework brings design-thinking to the appropriate level of the students who participate.
- The project is grounded in passion-based learning. Students are given the opportunity to create products that they are passionate about. Students use their passions, talents, and skills (individual and collaborative) as they participate in creating solutions for the problems they are working on.
- The project aims to help kids come up with different and genuine solutions. The nature of solutions that the students create depends on the nature of the problem they have identified. Hence, possible solutions may include but not limited to: making or inventing, information and advocacy campaigns, call to action through service, and philanthropy.
Visit: https://kidscanproject.weebly.com for moreinformation and resources.
