Innovating Education to Educate Innovators

Can we teach innovation? Innovation requires whole-brain thinking — right-brain thinking for creativity and imagination, and left-brain thinking for planning and execution. The prevalent approach to education in science and technology focuses on the transfer of information, developing mostly right-brain thinking by stressing copying and reproducing existing ideas rather than generating new ones. I will show how focusing in class on questioning and promoting social interaction leads to deeper learning and independent thinking. I will also present a new approach to get every student to prepare for every class using a new social learning platform that uses a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation factors to get all students ready for every class in a course.