We continually hear “think outside the box”. Last week I spoke those same words to my 14-year-old.
Her reply: “Mum, I’m making the box.”
Her generation is not scared to push the boundaries, develop their own rules and make their voices heard. I sometimes get overwhelmed just listening to her ideas on how she thinks.
It’s like trying to catch up with her in a marathon and her mind is running at top speed with all these ideas— new stories, plays, songs or how to manipulate the ‘mother’… It doesn’t always make sense to me!
For that reason, I believe she will choose a creative career.
Zara Chrichton, from Venture Cafe Sydney, has this to offer, “Current research future jobs shows us that creativity is the most transferable skill and is one of the greatest predictors of a job’s future prospects. In fact, creativity and project management skills proved to be the most potent skill mix for the future.”
Creativity’s place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
We often associate the word ‘creativity’ with activities relating to the arts and literature, something for the Picassos and Edgar Alan Poes of the world.
But it’s not a skill reserved only for these fields. In fact, the World Economic Forum has forecasted that creativity “will become one of the top three skills workers will need” in order to solve their customers’ problems, quicker and more efficiently. The future of the business scape will change as we rely more and more on robots for automated processes. As smart as they are, robots still cannot compete with humans on the creative front.
Creativity quenching the thirst of curiosity
Having an itch you can’t scratch is the worst feeling to experience and curiosity can work much the same. However, given access to the right resources, in combination with your bold imaginations, you can manipulate events in order to address that curiosity.
Inspiration can be found in the likes of Stitch Fix’s founder and CEO Katrina Lake and the late Steve Jobs. Both are successful individuals who had big questions to ask and an even bigger creative mind that wants to explore ways to obtain an answer. Neither had a lot of technical skills, yet they were able to use what they do know about technology as a stepping stone and allow what they are really good at, that is, their creativity and intuition to do the real grunt work.
Similarly, you don’t have to excel in coding but having a general understanding of what it is and how it can be utilised for problem-solving will be greatly beneficial. Especially, as mentioned before, the future is heading towards an automated-heavy, creativity-reliant era.
For this reason, students need to have access to a variety of resources that will foster a good foundation in them. They want to learn about technology in all shapes and sizes to better help them realise their amazing ideas into reality.
With Kai’s Clan we offer students a STEAM toolbox and they can choose which tool to use, depending on their own capability and outcome required.
To find out how Kai’s Clan can enrich your classroom and teaching, book a demo here.
and a 
for teaching kids coding
Autonomous Works Company