IdeaSquare launches its new educational programme after completing its pilot phase
With the launch of the IdeaSquare Planet programme comes an opportunity to participate in a co-creation workshop involving science fiction and space.
IdeaSquare Planet (i2Planet) is a novel teaching methodology to encourage creativity and foster systems thinking by taking students on an imaginary journey to an exoplanet and back to Earth. After having completed 13 pilot programmes with 255 students in 2023-24, IdeaSquare is proud to announce that i2Planet is now its flagship programme offered to multidisciplinary student teams tackling wicked problems. The goal of the pilots was to co-design the methodology with partner institutions and to test different approaches. As a result, a clear understanding of how to run meaningful interplanetary scenarios for the participants has emerged.
In the first half of i2Planet, students embark on a journey to tackle complex challenges in an imaginary environment that gives freedom to innovate without the social constructs already existing on Earth. The second half of the programme is focused on taking the ideas back to a real-world context focusing on current challenges, such as droughts and accessible healthcare.
might face in establishing life on an exoplanet
In its mission to bridge science and society, IdeaSquare focuses its educational programmes on teaching students to innovate for the future of our planet. The goal is purely educational: preparing students to be changemakers able to understand how to approach complex issues, emerging technologies, and their relation to society.
The new methodology is a part of IdeaSquare’s strive to be at the forefront of innovation education. What started 10 years ago as Challenge Based Innovation courses, was soon complemented with thought experiments in science fiction narratives where students imagine use cases for technologies in detection and imaging. As part of the ATTRACT EU programme, students collaborated with researchers by ideating potential applications for the technologies being developed. The i2Planet methodology complements the earlier programmes by further supporting students’ creative freedom, while also highlighting a systems thinking approach.
The IdeaSquare experience is designed to give students a sense of self-efficacy through managing to reach both quantitatively and qualitatively reasoned solutions to wicked problems through teamwork under a time pressure. The initial findings from questionnaires given to students indicate that IdeaSquare Planet is reaching its goals of helping students to think creatively and become better equipped to work in a multidisciplinary setting. In this new phase, IdeaSquare is continuing to make the programme more robust, by bringing in more expertise from within CERN and partner institutions.
IdeaSquare is inviting you to join the journey by participating in a 2-hour workshop on world-building for exoplanets, open to the CERN community. In this workshop, participants will have the chance to let their imagination fly, while respecting the laws of physics, and create alien scenarios for future IdeaSquare students to dive into.
If you are interested, please e-mail idea.square [at] cern.ch. To learn more about what IdeaSquare can offer, visit here.