Innovation Classes
Teach Children STEM, Design Thinking, and Leadership Skills
Our Innovation Workshop classes are designed in-house. They integrate design thinking, as well as teach children to create, persevere, and communicate successfully.
Each class follows this routine:
Mini-Lesson
We begin with a mini-lesson posing a challenge related to the class topic.
Team Project
Children have active team project time to work.
Presentation
Class ends with presentations: students share what they created that day and hear strengths, questions and suggestions from peers and teachers.
Innovation Class Highlights
My Company
In just a few weeks, students create a company idea, design prototypes, get feedback from teachers and parents, manufacture products or experiences, and sell them at My Company Day. Parents and community members buy experiences or products with pretend money. Students can use their profits to buy items from other student’s companies at My Company Day.
Workshop Inventors
Out of 10,000 plus inventions in the 2017 Imagination Foundation Inventor's Challenge, 154 were featured. Three of those featured were Workshop Education inventions. They were created during Workshop Inventor's Challenge classes during Innovation time.
Mia (4th grade), of Farallone View, brainstormed new solutions to transportation problems. As Mia presents her Neodymium Hoverboard Invention, you can see the confidence and skills children gain from daily presentations held at the end of each Innovation class.
Keira, a kindergartner at Woodside Elementary, showed caring for dogs and attention to recycling with her Dog Toy Invention! Way to go, Keira!
Roy Cloud Workshop students Elizabeth (4th), Charlotte (6th), and Charlotte (K) worked as a team on a concept for helping children with homework.
“At Workshop, I get to create.”
These children work to create products to help those who are blind. Building prototypes strengthens resilience, as it is not as easy as it looks. Our students learn patience and persistence to keep refining ideas until they find success.
From “I don’t like science” to “I love science”
We had a student who came into Workshop saying he didn't like science. After a visit from one of the Stanford scientists learning about work on invisibility cloaks, the student declared an hour later that he now loved science and wants to go to Stanford. What a difference “real life” learning can make.
