Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 9 September 2015 | Page 50

CURRICULUM

Designing the future of education

At Curro, ensure our learners are
taught how to think rather than
what to think so that they learn
to shape their minds, not their
careers
Research shows that children learn best when they
are actively involved in the learning process. The
founders of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) asked if
learning can happen where there are no schools.
They provided 20 illiterate children in a village in
Ethiopia with a solar-powered tablet computer,
preloaded with a variety of applications and no
instruction manual.
The children not only worked out how to switch
on the computer, but were learning the alphabet
within two weeks and could hack into the operating
system and change the settings six months later.

The experiment showed that when education stops
being about education and focuses instead on how
we learn what we learn, children become better
equipped to deal with tomorrow’s world.
One of the founders of OLPC, Seymour Papert, said,
“You can’t think about thinking unless you think
about thinking about something.” Asking these
questions are linked to the application of design
thinking which was first coined in 1987 and is a
way of thinking that uses a typical design cycle in
approaching a problem. Nicholas Negroponte,
head of MIT Media Lab, likens it to the process