The R&D Incubator for Training Teachers of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Teachers promote startup culture in school by nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship, through the development of products, systems, and solutions.

The incubator for training nurturing teachers in innovation and technological, engineering, and scientific entrepreneurship, is a products, systems, and solutions development platform to promote startup culture in the school while maintaining mutual interactions with startups and high-tech companies.

The R&D incubator employs three channels:

• The Educational HUB is a track for educational initiatives assisting a team of leading teachers and principals from various schools across the Network over a year-long process, resulting in the development of technological-engineering solutions employing the PBL approach with high-level Design Thinking.
• A Capsule for Pedagogical Innovation in a variety of relevant topics, while hosting and accepting support from professionals and mentors when needed.
• A Workshop and the MAKERs Curriculum: the workshop will serve as a model for a compact, yet well-equipped school workshop to establish a clear standard for such workshops within the Network. Any teacher who was trained to operate a workshop can participate in any other workshop and operate it relatively easily, since the technologies across the workshops will overlap, and a uniform basic standard for setting up and operating a workshop will be established. Based on this standard, each school will be able to extend the workshop and tailor it to its particular needs. The workshop’s staff will train teachers to upkeep and operate the workshops. As a model for a school workshop, all the purchases required for the workshop will be done while maximizing low budgets and using a gradual setup mechanism.

The workshop will be accompanied by a curriculum on the principles of Making for the junior-high-school. It will enable learning modeled on a Montessori space, with all the activities stored on the shelves being activities from the world of Making, bundled as a closed kit in a given standard, in various areas and levels: Arduino, mechanics, programming, 3D design, laser cutting, sewing, etc.