Importance of Creative Thinking

Why is creative thinking such an important skill to teach children?

Careers aren’t the same as they once were. We don’t leave education as an expert in one subject and do one job our entire life. Young people now need to be highly adaptable because they will jump between jobs and will constantly be presented with challenges they’ve never come across before. They’ll need creative problem-solving skills to be successful.

In my opinion, this is the future of education – creating individuals that can adapt.

Do you agree that certain subject disciplines are fading, to support this?

Absolutely – this is certainly true in IT, for example. Gone are the days of having specific lessons and learning how to type, create a document or browse the internet. Digital skills are useful in every single subject.

When I was a teacher, we’d have physics students doing some data analysis while product design students would be researching materials. Both sets would be working with spreadsheets as they needed to complete calculations, so we’d bring them together and integrate learnings from the IT department into the wider curriculum.

We just mapped it out, considering where we used certain skills across all the subject areas, and where they can be taught more effectively by encouraging these skills across subjects.

The same can also be said for creative skills. To be more effective and efficient you need to be able to form creative solutions for things, whether you’re creating a piece of art or are faced with a scientific query.

What was the motivation behind the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) event you organised in 2022?

We wanted to create an experience where children can go and be inspired by careers they didn’t know about. At ACS, we work in partnership with a lot of local state schools and so I spend a lot of time talking with school leaders. Whenever we discuss trends or opportunities where we could work together to benefit children across the region, STEAM always comes up.

It can be difficult for individual schools to access the expertise, facilities or resources for all of these subjects. But because of the scale of the event, we were able to pool our resources and get so many fantastic exhibits together. On the day, children interacted with everything from helicopters to Titan the robot. We gamified it – children could only ride on a rollercoaster after they’d collected a certain amount of stamps from the educational exhibits.

How was it received by the staff at the state schools that attended?

Every activity was created in line with the curriculum, so teachers knew that they could meet their requirements. Our tagline was: “This isn’t a day off school – this is school” and the teachers loved it. It’s obviously satisfied a real need in education, while allowing different industries to put the word out about the careers they offer.

Engineering, for example, is really struggling to recruit at the moment. Hopefully events like this can start to inspire children and bridge that gap. It’s all about encouraging employability.

How important is it for children to have access to the right resources to encourage experimentation in education?

The teachers we meet within local schools are amazing – what they manage to do with the resources they have is incredible. But there’s always room to add more.

It’s always such a shame if there’s a student showing a real interest in something, but there’s not an opportunity for them to excel at it.

The links between local primary schools, secondary schools and ACS – and our links with universities – are so important because it gives local children access to more resources. The pooling of resources means that you’re giving opportunities to children that they just wouldn’t have unless people collaborate and work together. You can show them a video online of 3D printers, for example – but if you can bring them somewhere where they can programme and practice on state-of-the-art machines, they’ll get a much more fulfilling experience.

Alongside the STEAM 2022 event, we have a constantly moving resource via our outreach boxes. Here we might have Virtual Reality headsets, for example. After giving teachers training, we’ll then give them the technology to integrate into their lessons for a number of weeks. Across the course of a year, thousands more students have the opportunity to use software and hardware that they wouldn’t have been able to touch otherwise.

And this is so important – above everything, children need to be creative and highly adaptable individuals that don’t fear change. This way when new technology comes along, they’re keen to learn how it can help them rather than being in fear.

Adapting a multi-disciplinary approach across subjects can help to encourage innovation, using technology to find solutions to a myriad of problems. To do this, though, students need to be exposed to a wide range of tools to become comfortable with new technology. One of the most important skills for education in the future will be the ability to adapt, rather than to master one subject that could soon become outdated.

By Graeme Lawrie, ACS Partnerships Director