Envisioning a future where creativity, coding and computational thinking will be important life skills, Create Lab, an education facilitator headquartered in Singapore provides essential tools and facilities to assist children to develop digital skills and an inventive mindset, that would empower them to thrive in the 21st century.
Equipped with resources and expertise from educators from Oxford, MIT and Singapore’s top universities, Create Lab Sri Lanka commenced operation in January this year. Its coding and robotic design workshops have been recognized as Singapore’s leading Computational Thinking enrichment programs and these programs cater to children in age groups of 5 to 12.
Coding serves as the communication tool or the language that commands computers to execute tasks. It is the core aspect of creating all software, including applications, websites and other digital tools.
With this ability to instruct computers to complete tasks, comes the possibility of inventing virtual worlds inside the devices.
Equipped with imagination and analytical thinking, it opens children to a world of unlimited possibilities.
“In an increasingly digitalized world, skills that usher in success are going to be one’s ability to imagine, create, empathize and solve problems. Computer programming and coding skills are powerful tools that can stimulate and bring forth these already existing abilities within children.
Coding helps children improve their analytical thinking and helps them to look at the bigger picture.
Empowering children to use technology to create, rather than just consume, is what we do best,” commented Create Lab Co-Founder/Chief Executive Officer, Thilan Wickramasinghe.
Commenting on the work that Create Lab has initiated in Sri Lanka, Create Lab Director, Michelle Pinto said, “Our main introductory program to Computational Thinking (ICT101) will inspire students to become powerful computational thinkers. During our workshops students can code their own computer games, digital art, program robots and develop hardware.
Our focus is to inspire children to experiment, solve problems, identify patterns and use their imagination.
These are highly portable skills that help them excel in school and at home, but most importantly, in their future careers.”
The children are exposed to state-of-the-art software solutions available and, Create Lab collaborates with the National University of Singapore (NUS) Enterprise, Google, SoftBank and the Info comm and Media Development Authority of Singapore to develop their solutions.
Create Lab also provides free cloud based resources to allow children to share their work with family and friends and continue to improve their approaches, outside the classroom. “Learning to rely on their own ingenuity and problem solving skills will help children become better decision makers with the ability to use available resources to generate the best outcome in any given situation.
They will invariably start thinking critically and strive to find solutions to problems.
Our workshops also encourage children to communicate and work in teams. This would help in their academic life as well as in the real world,” said, Create Lab Co-Founder/President, Dhruv Vohra.
Commenting on the importance of encouraging girls to develop their coding and computational skills, Vohra added, “We need to break the cycle which limits the admission of girls and women into the world of computer science.
These skills would be essential tools to succeed in the future, and both, boys and girls should start developing their digital know-how from a young age to be able to become valuable members of tomorrow’s digital landscape.”