A New 'Edge' For Dubai?

Today,the KHDA’s ‘What Works’ event welcomed guest speaker John Kao to Dubai to discuss just how to bring innovation to schools.

After introducing his unique Edgemakers programme to assembled principals and teachers, he announced he really wanted to bring the programme to Dubai and eventually to the whole Middle East region.

He told the group, that while he had been invited as the ‘What Works’ guest speaker, he was also on a ‘fact-finding’ mission of his own, saying he found the UAE’s 2021 Strategic Vision- visionary and a perfect fit for his innovative Edgemakers programme.

Accomplished musician, associate professor at Harvard Business school, advisor to numerous governmental bodies and author, Kao is now founder and chairman of two extremely successful innovation based companies.

Founded in 2013, Edgemakers is billed as a ‘movement’ rather than a curriculum, its available in North and South America, Asia and Europe as either a classroom programme or for self-directed learners via mobile/internet platforms.

The course includes videos and projects to get young people started in generating new ideas, developing them and learning how to take them to market. The programme is said to combine best practice from numerous diverse disciplines including: design, business studies and experimental psychology.

Edgemakers is aimed squarely at Generation Z (those born after 2000) of which Kao says, “these children realise there are significant world issues and demand change, they want to be entrepreneurs and make a difference to the world.”

The programme aims to equip these students for, “an increasingly global and technology-mediated world –  one that prizes an ability to be proactive and to couple innovation and entrepreneurship to purpose.”

“What we call edge capacities require an ability to grasp the nature of our changing world and exercise judgment.  They require practice and continual development and cannot be reduced to a simple set of skills that can be read from a book and tested on an exam.”

Edgemakers can offer schools a full high school curriculum incorporating over 150 lessons, an accelerated high school curriculum and /or alternative learning centre offering ‘Edgemakers essentials’ and digital fluency, plus a self-directed learning and a teacher development programme.

For more information visit: www.edgemakers.com