ImagineBox: Interactive Discovery Zone
Do you remember classrooms from your school days? They probably looked almost exactly the same as they do today – four walls, desks, chairs, a board and a teacher standing before the students, explaining the lesson material. Of course, today we have Power Point presentations, Kahoot (a game-based learning platform) and other technological tools. Yet students continue to sit at their desks trying to follow teachers’ explanations as they summarize the material in their notebooks.
Now imagine coming into a classroom that has no board and no tables. There might be a few chairs set against one of the walls, but that's it. The teacher enters the room and turns off the lights. In an instant, the walls are transformed into an interactive environment – any environment – and you (and the students) suddenly find yourselves exploring a pre-historic cave, the Western Wall and its tunnels, or a coral reef under the water...
While the teacher raises important concepts and details, interactive explanations and practice exercises appear on the walls. The children can imagine, touch, and actively participate in the lesson, which not only informs them about the coral reef but lets them be a part of it.
After that, the children can experience the learned material from other angles, with the help of virtual reality (VR) glasses or an augmented reality (AR) sandbox. The children can even program a cleaning route for the bottom of the sea and see a little robot pick up the trash.
What would you say if this was your school experience or that of your children? What if when asking your child "How was school today?" instead of receiving the usual "fine" you would hear a whole story about a magical adventure?
Experiential learning has been proven as one of the most effective learning methods a long time ago, so why has it not been implemented everywhere?
That's where Athena Fund and our ImagineBox come in. Designed as an interactive discovery zone for building tomorrow's life skills today, ImagineBox will enter schools in a specially-designed building containing four advanced technologies. It will serve as an innovative classroom in which we hope to provide students with more effective experiential learning, while also promoting Athena's vision of empowering and advancing teachers.
This empowerment will come as a result of professional training in all four technologies, following which the teachers will build their lesson plans themselves. After all, we cannot advance the students unless we first advance the teachers.
After over a year of intensive work, ImagineBox is being revealed to the public as an innovative, first-of-its-kind project in Israel. We are very excited as we're expecting the first ImagineBox to be established in the upcoming months.