I was a classroom teacher for more than 20 years. I used Playnovate lessons when I first taught online and I was not sure how this would work. But to my surprise, it felt like I was in the classroom with my students. Playnovate made this possible in the design of the lessons, the structure and creativity of the slide presentations, the applicability of the hands-on activities, the review portion supported with a mind map, and the questions at the end of each lesson.

The level of engagement and inquiry learning is so meaningful in these STEAM lessons. It goes beyond what a textbook typically teaches. The way lessons are structured with the right balance of the hands-on activities makes it so, that students know they are active participants in the learning process. They also know how they become co-teachers in the process. They develop a sense of discovery, of self-worth, and connection to the world.

Playnovate's integrated STEAM lessons remove the silos between the walls of science, technology, engineering, aesthetics, and math. This framework allows the students to grab and use a framework or what I call an intellectual toolkit that spans and cuts through fields that host human experiences and builds dispositions of learning that gives them the ability to critically think and prepare learners ready for the new industrial revolution 4.0.

In today's education environment, it is important for students to feel safe in the classroom so they can take risks in creating and sharing ideas. Playnovate's STEAM program consolidates and crystallizes this teaching strategy. Students are not only invited to take risks but are rewarded for taking risks. That's a very different shift. The affirmative reinforcement when students make mistakes is something not familiar with our teachers. Playnovate lessons model this in ways that our teachers can learn from perfectly well.

Playnovate lessons are fun and easy to use. The lesson structures are guided by neuroscience research. Strategies as to how to get students to become effective learners are creatively applied into STEAM topics. For example, students need to be motivated and engaged and need to use multiple senses and multiple modalities and work on hands-on projects.

Every Playnovate lesson begins with a question that drives students' curiosity. Students get a sense of accomplishment at the end when they get to answer the questions through discovery and exploration, experiments, and other project-oriented activities.

I'm excited because I'm seeing that the lessons are working. Playnovate has been a great set of lessons for our school to advance. I'm excited also because I see the face of our students. When they see the experiments and when they realize how much more they can understand the ideas and actually express their understanding. I can see their enthusiasm. They are learning. They are achieving clarity. They are doing something different from previous science classes. I can describe this as an important change in the way of teaching. This means we can do so many more different things in our school programs. Our students understand how things work in our environment by doing the discovery themselves. It's a great change.

I like to think of Leonardo da Vinci when I think of Playnovate's STEAM programs. He is the combination of an artist, a scientist, and an inventor. Playnovate creates lessons that offers students opportunities to learn through STEAM in a multidisciplinary, multi-team, creative, real-world problem solving and thinking out of the box learning experiences. The lessons inspire students to solve scientific and engineering problems in imaginative and creative ways while using scientific perspectives and engineering methods. Playnovate's education programs have the ability to follow and amplify a child's interest while discovering ways by which science can impact inventions, businesses, and policies.

What Playnovate is doing at the elementary level is what I am doing at the university level and professional level. In my work as a professor and a design engineer, I integrate the creative and technical disciplines—art and engineering. For the longest time, in universities, you were either a technical expert or in the science and engineering fields or an artist in the creative fields. However, we soon realized that science and engineering solutions required the use of one's imagination and a sense of aesthetics. On the other side, artists need to have an understanding of terminologies spoken by technical experts. We are now entering into what's been called the 4th industrial revolution, marked by the merging of the physical, biological, and digital worlds. Fundamental innovation and transformations have taken place represent a transition to a new phase of civilization. Children today will have to figure out, for example, the parameters and possibilities of genetic engineering by thinking realistically, creatively, and ambitiously about the challenges and opportunities of the intersection of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math.