NEUE SCHULE ATHEN: FLOW MAKERS CLUB FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

Have you ever played piano with bananas?
How does a knot change place?
How many messages can a pass convey?
Can you design your own games?

We offer Flow Makers Club for the students of the elementary school Neue Schule Athen.

Technology and Play, function as creative curiosity amplifiers at Flow. Students play, explore, create and share their experiences, in a workshop track for personal perception and development. The club activities span one academic year, with a two-hour meeting per week.

We apply experiential learning best practices to our workshops, in a flexible environment that connects learning to the needs and interests of youth, allowing for self expression and individual talent exploration.
We focus on exploring multiple angles to approach a challenge, and on borrowing know-how from unrelated disciplines to promote a more personal and fulfilling path, whether applied to learning or more broadly.

We create a conducive environment for youth to cultivate creative thinking in problem solving and decision making; to train their critical thinking skills, as well as ways of working for effective communication and collaboration; to develop skills and competencies important for their career and life.
 
"Education is what people do to you, whereas Learning is what you do to yourself", succinctly observes MIT Media Lab Director, Joi Ito.

The kind of deep learning process we care about at Flow, happens when the students are interested and actively involved. 
Because learning develops; unfolds; reveals; highlights the uniqueness of each individual; offers multiple stimuli to cultivate the students' diverse talents; empowers them to chart their own paths towards personal and professional development.

Two thirds of the professions today’s youth will exercise throughout their careers have not been invented yet. Some of them will emerge from synthesizing knowledge and applying existing methods in new disciplines. 
A key competency to successfully navigate this changing environment is adaptability: learning how to learn; learning how to internalize concepts, methods and skills, as transferable tools, in order to apply them in innovative ways and in new contexts.
 
Let’s imagine we are participating at Flow Club with a group of students. Let’s step in their shoes and live their experience.

We work in small groups and collaboratively address a wide array of challenges, DIY projects and learning games, driven by our interests.
We come to Flow Club with open minds and senses. We often don't know in advance what to anticipate, so there is an element of surprise. We tinker with diverse stimuli and explore new ideas, that we may have never visited in the past. We train our critical thinking skills. We challenge our assumptions.

We shed light to familiar tools from new angles, in a process of personal discovery and - at the same time - collective sharing. We experiment with different strategies and explore the ones that work better. 

We cultivate creative thinking in problem solving.
We learn to collaborate and to communicate effectively. We listen actively. We negotiate. We build trust. We work as a team.

We design and develop original games. We propose changes to the rules. We test and experience what works best in practice. What doesn’t work, in our workshops, offers valuable information on what might work better and on the game development process. Failure is part of the game and it doesn't demoralize us. We reevaluate and try a different approach.

We utilize digital technology as a creative curiosity amplifier. We become makers of the web, instead of remaining passive content consumers. We tell our own stories, by building webpages, by remixing videos and pictures. We share our inspirations and what we make. We create hybrid experiences, merging the digital and the physical world.

We practice different ways of three-dimension spacial perception, through unusual dice rotations, DIY projects, challenges and learning games.

We train awareness and control of the human body. The body becomes an extension of the brain. It participates, communicates, senses and reveals our relationship with the environment.

We foster a maker mindset. We take initiatives. We experiment. We tinker with systems, tools, products and applications. We improve them. We build new ones. We innovate.

We discover our individual special talents through a wide array of stimuli. We develop competencies important to our careers and lives.

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