Free Activity: Prototyping Challenge
This activity will get students straight into generating solutions for a user or client’s problems by creating a prototype.
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VentureLab Champion Tina Belden encourages creativity in the classroom
Using VentureLab curriculum has allowed Tina’s students to take on an essential entrepreneurial belief: “I can be as creative as I want and it’s not wrong.”
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Fostering Frontiers of Knowledge in Youth with a Curiosity and Growth Mindset
What if you don’t have the answers to a child’s questions? What if you can’t even begin to guess? That’s okay. In fact, it may be even better for a child’s development! VentureLab explores how encouraging curiosity and a growth mindset in children can open the frontiers of knowledge and foster innovative thinking.
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Free Resource: This Is Not…
This activity is an improvisation game where students take an ordinary object and transform it into ANYTHING they can think of, either real or imaginary.
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Free Activity: Pitch Game
The Pitch Game requires little time to create a learning experience where your students will creatively generate ideas and confidently pitch to an audience.
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Start Them Young
In these recent posts in which I’ve offered tips on raising entrepreneurial girls, I’ve suggested ways to foster their curiosity, encourage girls to remain idealistic (and to use that idealism to push themselves creatively), and to embrace and learn from failure. Here I look at an important tip for raising an entrepreneurial girl: start quite…
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Help Them “Scamper” To Creativity
In these last few posts, I’ve been providing a series of tips for raising entrepreneurial girls. So far, these have included letting them embrace failure, helping them unleash their creativity, harvesting their idealism and letting them get messy as they get creative and discover what makes things tick. This next tip for raising entrepreneurial girls…
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Let Them Get Messy!
Whenever women in science or technology reminisce about girlhood, they remember the joy of getting dirty. Many of us who’ve grown up to be scientists and engineers recall spending more time in jeans than in dresses. And a lot of us loved playing with mud. My sisters and I had the great advantage of a…
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Make Play Time Curiosity Time
In this series of blogs, I am offering tips on raising entrepreneurial girls. When you raise girls to think like entrepreneurs, they go on to become creators and entrepreneurs. In addition, these tips will lead to children learning to increase their mental agility and to develop adaptive thinking. Here I’m looking at the first tip…
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Girls Can Become Entrepreneurs Before They Even Start School
Most 5-year-olds have not yet been to school, and don’t yet understand what it is to make a failing grade. What better time to introduce them to the entrepreneurial skill of learning from successive failures? Testing, trying, failing, rethinking, adjusting, failing again, wisely—this cycle is designed into Entrepreneurship 101 for 5- to 7-year-olds. We ensure…
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Let Children Grow By Following Their Interests
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Pablo Picasso once said. Too often, children lose the confidence to follow their interests because of an educational system that is test-obsessed and focused on correct answers instead of creative problem-solving. The loss can be gradual, subtle and…
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Encourage Girls to Identify Problems and Find Soultions
For young girls, every day is a new adventure of first-time experiences, discovering boundaries along the way. The entrepreneurial twist is to encourage girls to identify their problems and think about solutions to frustrations, focusing and improving on their ideas, with just enough guidance and assistance from grown-ups. When I teach 5-year-olds, I’m continually struck…
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Allowing Girls The Freedom to Create
There aren’t many experiences that take place in a conventional school in which there are no grades, no penalties for not following rules, no possibility of a humiliating failure, no multiple choice test nor essay, no consequence for disruption, no avoidance of “coloring outside the lines,” no swipe at GPAs, no carrots or sticks, no…
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Measure The Quest For Knowledge
Over the last six posts, I’ve outlined six of the seven strategies for encouraging creativity and curiosity in young girls, which I’ve identified through my own work and teaching, and through the findings that Frans Johannson explored in his book The Medici Effect. So far, I’ve introduced you to strategies for: Here is the seventh strategy…
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Empowering Girls in Science through Art and Design Integration
Learn how art and design are being used as powerful tools to encourage more girls to pursue science. This innovative approach combines creativity with scientific learning, aiming to create a more inclusive and appealing environment in STEM fields.
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Help Girls to Learn How Creative STEAM Can Be
Discover how VentureLab encourages girls to embrace the STEM fields by showcasing the inherent creativity in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (eSTEAM). Learn about the transformative experiences and educational approaches that can guide more girls towards innovative eSTEAM careers.
