Every month, Kodely’s co-founder, Sri Narayanan, will share a short brain dump of everything she’s been thinking about. This month I’ve been thinking about how we’re preparing our children for the future and equipping them with the life skills they need to thrive as adults.
There’s no doubt that by 2035, the majority of job openings will likely be in STEM fields and anyone from teachers to product designers will need to have competent tech literacy skills to be savvy just to use the increasingly sophisticated tools of their trades.
When I started to ask parents how they currently felt about preparing their children for their future adult careers, most responded stating they did an acceptable or OK job. I commonly noticed that parents mentioned their children questioned the topics they were learning in a classroom setting and through extracurriculars or had no way of recalling information after a test and therefore, forgot it all.
Kids growing up today will inherit challenges greater than any generation before them, and this demands new approaches to preparing them. I believe that our most important job is not filling their head with knowledge, rather preparing them to understand problems and develop solutions using exciting or new knowledge. We need to focus on projects that train students how to use the available resources and help learners develop and maintain a rich portfolio of creative project-based work. If we can focus on our children’s ability to learn, adapt and create, they’ll be able to tackle any problem they may face.
Enrolling your child in a STEM camp or coding class is a great first start but doesn’t guarantee your cultivating a curious kid who’s set up with all the skills they need for the 21st-century. A child who memorizes syntax or blocks from an instructor who tells them exactly what to build is missing on key learning processes. More than any technical skill your child can learn, the three skills I believe they need for the future are:
- Grit
- Complex Problem Solving
- Tech Literacy
At Kodely, our learning model for each of our tech literacy workshops is focused on providing learners the skills they need to succeed no matter what field they go into. Through each workshop, our Kodely Leaders are available for experiential learning, group exploration, building projects and design challenges. Our learners are empowered, motivated and energized because the measures of success in our workshops are based on successful completion of the tasks they have set out to do. We’re building a community of learners who embrace risk-taking, creative problem-solving, and collaboration and have a bias towards action.