Students and teachers are using a new tool to support the development of critical and creative thinking; programmemable robots. In the corridors and classrooms of GEMS Dubai American Academy, GEMS Modern Academy, GEMS Kindergarten Starters and others, children can be seen building and programming robots to solve problems and to express ideas.

For many teachers, their journey with robotics began this summer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Teachers from KG1 through the secondary school from across GEMS Education met at Carnegie Mellon University for the second annual GEMS/CMU Interdisciplinary Robotics and Computational Thinking Conference.

The conference was aimed to train classroom teachers in how they can integrate robotics, and computational thinking across their daily classroom curriculum ensuring that students gain critical skills and dispositions from an early age.

Michael Gernon, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Innovation, Research and Development GEMS Education, said, "Today's students need to create with computational thinking and robotics in an ongoing way to inspire curiosity, imagination, play, invention and to cultivate the necessary skills they will need for a world of unprecedented complexity.

"The knowledge and dispositions necessary to understand and create with computational thinking and robotics are now a 21st-century imperative. This conference is GEMS Education’s effort towards preparing its teachers in un-paralleled ways, to meet the growing needs of a transformation education sector and a rapidly evolving world," added Gernon.

At the conference, GEMS teachers learned and created with luminaries in the fields of computational thinking, robotics and education and created incredible projects that they can take directly back to their schools and classrooms.

The Interdisciplinary Robotics and Computational Thinking Conference is part of a pioneering professional learning programme organised with the goal of to inspire curiosity, imagination, play, invention and to cultivate the necessary skills students will need for a world of unprecedented complexity.

Participating teachers met this week to plan the inaugural GEMS Computational Thinking Summit to be held in November, focused on sharing their learning with teachers across the GEMS Network.