Education Unleashed
While we lead as the world’s greatest innovators, our international leadership position is eroding. The solution lies in embracing education’s strategic importance. We need to create a new school model that integrates real world experiences; that integrates the future of industry with regional economic realities. A new model that embraces the needs of today’s students.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. It is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students — kindergarten through college — represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.
It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Berry of Baylor College of Medicine. It is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed — and are different from ours — as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed.
Education needs to be relevant to today’s students and leverage their thinking patterns. To engage today’s students we need to bring the “real world” into education. We do this by leveraging current investments in our nation’s most powerful technologies: interactive entertainment, modeling and simulation. Tomorrow’s design, engineering and scientific workforces must possess 21st century skills and be able to work with these advanced industry technologies.
There is a natural technical synergy between the interactive entertainment, modeling and simulation technologies. Video games and virtual worlds are the prevalent and expanding means of entertainment for young people. Games teach by encouraging competition, experimentation, exploration, and innovation. Video games contain rules that constrain action, force players to make choices and experience the consequences of those actions, and can be an effective vehicle to encourage learners to form hypotheses and then test them against actual outcomes in the simulated world. Video games foster critical thinking by requiring players to solve problems.
Modeling and simulation tools are the immersive environments that our next-generation designers, engineers and scientists must master. These tools offer a rich and scalable environment, the means to design and build engineered systems, as well as to investigate and visualize complex scientific phenomena. The modeling and simulation industry is cross-cutting. It is part of every major vertical market: aerospace, life sciences, energy, automotive and entertainment. Innovation is the lifeblood of these industries.
When these technologies become central to a new school model, education becomes strategically linked to industry and our economy. Education will then play a powerful role in unleashing our youth’s creative potential and our nation’s innovation engine. This is education unleashed.