With the support of CTF Education Group, Victoria Educational Organisation (VEO) together with Project Zero of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) co-collaborated on the study, “Agency by Design: Early Childhood in the Making”, immersing students in Maker-Centered Learning (MCL) within and beyond the STEAM disciplines. Gaining a foothold in STEAM disciplines equips students with the skills, knowledge and values necessary to thrive in a fast-changing world.

VEO incorporates child-friendly thinking routines focused on MCL goals into students’ inquiry-based learning activities. These routines serve to foster students’ critical and creative thinking skills, systems thinking skills as well as their empathy for others. VEO worked with researchers to explore the practices and pedagogies of MCL in a variety of our kindergarten settings. Within this study, five thinking routines (Parts, Purposes, Complexities; Parts, People, Interactions; My Perspective, Other Perspectives; Think, Feel, Care; and Imagine If) were adapted for early childhood education, and integrated into our trilingual inquiry-based learning activities.

The joint research has also resulted in the publication of Playbook: Maker-Centered Learning Playbook for Early Childhood Education, a maker-centered step-by-step learning detailing VEO’s pioneering adoption of the MCL approach in kindergarten classes. All of the VEO kindergartens have incorporated maker-centered STEAM learning into current teaching practices and programm

The tailored MCL activities have encouraged our students to look closely at and explore the complexities of the systems around them, stimulating them to inquire into the actions that they can take to improve the systems.

STEAM Festival highlight