Revolution, TC2027

We need one, we need a revolution on the way we learn.

I am currently developing a project that started with one of our professors, Sergio Hernández.
He started Estación Meiquer to give Social Service hours to ITESM GDA students. I was lucky to be one of them, because it covers topics I really like.
But for about a year now, we wanted to do more than giving Social Service hours, we see that there is a need for kids to change the way they think and the way they learn. We see everyday the consequences of a bad educational system, even here, at my school; there hasn't been a single time where partials are comming, and I see students studying from very specific questions and exercises (it took me a few semesters to realize they were studying from exams). I've seen students that take pictuers of the exam as soon as it's on their hands, before making it and after the professor gives them back so we can check our mistakes. What went wrong? Why is it more important to get an exam or find really clever ways to copy, than actual learning? Why is a number (grade) more important than all the effort someone can make on a whole semester learning by experimentation or research? Why aren't we allowed to make mistakes? We're not perfect, we learn from mistakes, I can tell you that the things I remember or learned the most, are things I struggled with, I had to find a way to solve it or I f*cked up really bad.

Our project is called Estación Meiquer, our goal is for kids to develop skills that, according to the World Economic Forum, will drive the 4^th Industrial Revolution. These skills are:

• ·         Problem solving
• ·         Critical thinking
• ·         Creativity
• ·         Emotional intelligence
• ·         Collaboration

We should stop and think about what we’re learning, having the ability to solve problems on our own and in a creative way. We do so with activities and games, every one of them focuses on at least one of these skills. For every activity, we do the following steps:

1.  Inspire: we inspire the kids with a story or an example of something big that has been made or something important for the activity we will present them.
2. Imagine: we give them time to imagine what they want to do, to draw whatever their solution is, with the intention to let them explore their imagination and don’t give them any limitations.
3. Create: now we let kids create the idea they worked on, here they face challenges and roadblocks, we don’t tell them the solutions, we encourage them and guide them to try to solve them on their own.
4. Share: After they’ve created their idea, we let them share it with their classmates, to make them feel proud of what they made and it’s a space in which they must talk in front of other kids while the attention is on them, they also learn what other kids created.
5. Play: we give them this free space to play, using what they created, with other kids.

Our intention is to change the lives of these kids, showing them how awesome learning can be and letting them experiment and never be afraid of failing. We want them to fail, we want to show them that when we fail or f*ck up, NOTHING happens, that's the way A LOT of things that we have nowaydays happened. We don't want them competing for a place, or a number, we want them to work at their pace, and believe they are capable of doing great things.

I imagine, if everyone learns this way or is motivated this way, we wouldn't see the things we see even at a school such as ITESM, where students are really, really good... at cheating.