After 4 year's thinking, planning, talking and a bit of doing, its time.
We're finally ready to inspire, to power, to connect a community to walk the talk, to inspire their children with creativity by telling them all about what we've been doing at STEAM Co. for 4 years now and giving them all they need to take and run their own STEAM Co. Days.
And we've chosen Liverpool, or did Liverpool choose us? We're certainly not arguing about it.
Not another ted talk
Now we've seen some TED talks in our time, and regular readers will know how the other famous Liverpudlian, Sir Ken Robinson and his no. 1 TED talk inspired us to start STEAM Co. in the first place.
Last summer we noticed TED-X Liverpool with Sir Ken on the bill (he happened to be in town to record his desert island discs debut) but it wasn't his talk that caught our eye but one entitled 'Industrialist Turned Educator' featuring.... a large teddy bear and...
...an interview between TED-X Liverpool curator Herb Kim and Nigel Ward, an unassuming Yorkshireman who told the story of how he'd parked his high flying publishing and media career to transform a number of particularly challenged schools, and ultimately children's lives, in Liverpool as CEO of the Northern Schools Trust which he founded.
An epicentre FOR STEAM SKILLS
Two of the trust's schools, Liverpool Life Sciences UTC and The Studio are co-located in an old Tate and Lyle sugar warehouse in the old docks, now the thriving 'Baltic Triangle' creative quarter. Also known as the Contemporary Urban Centre (CUC) the building is a former arts centre that was converted at a cost of £16m to support Liverpool's year as cultural capital.
The two schools are something of a power house for developing STEAM skills in the opportunities they now offer the local 14-19 years who study there.
The Studio Liverpool is a school dedicated to digital media and games development.
It has strong connections to Liverpool's reputation as a global computer games development centre.
It's more than well placed to take advantage of Liverpool's profile in the UK's booming technology economy, being recently acknowledged as the 2nd most rapidly developing technology hub out of London by the Tech Nation report.
Liverpool Life Sciences UTC (University Technical College) provides university-standard science facilities and education to develop skills in young people for Liverpool’s booming biosciences economy.
It has a visiting life biochemistry professor from Sheffield University, Professor Dave Hornby, and a number of its students have already gone on to study science at prestigious UK universities.
OUR KICK-off event
At Nigel's invitation we visited the schools for a day and parents' evening. Having met the principals and their totally engaged and committed teams as well as a number of the children, we were quite simply blown away by what they are doing, so when they offered us use of the building for a two day STEAM Co. kick-off event what could we say and do, but bite their hand off.
STEAM Co, DAY Friday 24th April
They've asked us to help run a STEAM Co. Day for children from their local feeder primary schools. This will feature a range of thinking and doing activities across the STEAM skills that the children will be free to choose from. The activities will be run by a range of STEAM artists with support from parents, teacher and pupils from the UTC and The Studio.
STEAM Co KICK off Saturday 25th April
Here we're going to run a day of 20 or so short talks for local parents and teachers who are keen to inspire their children with creativity.
The day will consist of world class keynote speakers alongside artists from across the STEAM Skills as well as parents and teachers and we'll also be introducing some of STEAM Co.'s launch Inspirators.
A key take away will be a tool-kit for attending parents to take away to run their own STEAM Co. Day and help deliver on our target of having run 50 pilot STEAM Co. Days across the UK by the end of 2015.
In parallel with this we'll be running creative workshops on the day for children of the delegates.
All the talks will be filmed and uploaded to our YouTube channel, possibly even streamed live.
POLITICAL HOT POTATO
With the election only a week away we're inviting leading politicians to come and talk or send a film of their policies around creativity in education.
Somehow we think the next few weeks are going to be a lot of fun pulling it all together. This particular aeroplane just took off, we'd better start building it now!
We do hope you'll join us when it comes in to land on the 25th. Because it will land.
More info here: