Piet Griemonprez [00:00:00]:
It’s by accepting the complexity of it all that you can actually find a really simple solution. And I’d love the education system to stimulate students to accept this complexity and to use systems thinking instead of just trying to figure out the quickest way possible, the simplest solution.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:23]:
Hello everyone. My name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:27]:
And my name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:29]:
This is the fueling creativity in education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:33]:
On this show we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:38]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:48]:
All with the goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:57]:
So let’s begin today we welcome to the show Pete Graham Onpres, who is the co founder and managing director of my machine, a for purpose nonprofit working globally. My machine has a unique and multiaward winning methodology that unites students in primary, secondary and higher education to cocreate dream machines invented by children based in Belgium, Pete and his team have grown my machine into 13 countries. My machine has been widely recognized and endorsed by the likes of the United Nations, Harvard, the Lego foundation, and Fast company to name a few. My machine was recently inducted into the renowned hundred hall of Fame. Pete is the author of the book what is your Dream machine? How children change Education worldwide, with a foreword written by Sir Ken Robinson. He is the founder and cofounder of different industry crossover networks in his native country. And prior to my machine, he worked in higher education for 15 years, establishing research collaborations with companies around the world. Welcome to the show Pete.

Piet Griemonprez [00:02:06]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s a great honor.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:09]:
I want to start with this idea around my machine. Where did you come up with this idea?

Piet Griemonprez [00:02:13]:
Well, my machine was founded by three people, so Jan and Philip, my co founders and myself. And we started with the idea to ask children in primary class, if we could build a dream machine for you, what would that machine do? And anything goes, just as long as the child really wants it. And then we decided that for step number two, we want to engage with university students and they help out in translating that idea into a concept. And in step number three, we reach out to vocational or technical secondary level students and they help out in creating a working prototype. So in one school year or academic year, we go from idea to concept to working prototype. And we do this with lots of schools at the same time.

Cyndi Burnett [00:03:03]:
That sounds like so much fun. So you start my machine with an open ended question, which is, what is your dream machine? So why is it called a dream machine and why not just like a dream? What’s that importance of that open ended nature of the dream machine?

Piet Griemonprez [00:03:21]:
Well, there’s two important elements to that. One is that if you would ask somebody or a child, what is your dream? The answer might be, my dream is to be able to talk about my emotions with my peers, with other children and my parents and so on. Whilst if you ask, what is your dream machine? Immediately you make sure that those children think about the next step. It’s not just a dream, but it’s also thinking about, and how can I accomplish that idea? How can I make sure that this idea comes to life? So asking them to create a dream machine, the answer there might be, I want a machine that helps me to talk about my emotions, and then we can start a conversation with that child and asking like, okay, and how does this machine works? What does it do? What’s the human machine interface? How does it look like? And so on. So the question what is your dream machine? Dives deeper into it, goes into the how as well, and not just, it doesn’t just remain a dream. And the other thing about the fact that the question is open ended is extremely important to us, because if it would not be open ended, it would again be us, the adults, saying to the children what we think is important, instead of listening to them what they feel or decide what is important at that specific moment in their lives. So sometimes you have people saying like, I want to be part with my class in my machine. But this year round, we’re working in the theme of climate action, or whatever it is.

Piet Griemonprez [00:05:17]:
So we would like them to come up with ideas on climate action. And for us, that is a no go, because as I said, it would be us telling the children that climate action is important instead of listening to them.

Cyndi Burnett [00:05:29]:
Got you. So it’s completely student led?

Piet Griemonprez [00:05:32]:
It is really student led? Yes, absolutely.

Matthew Worwood [00:05:35]:
I’m interested in kind of like the progression as it goes from early years to kind of older children. I’m just curious, how does the kind of evolution of the idea progress as it kind of makes its way up the grade levels per se?

Piet Griemonprez [00:05:50]:
Well, it starts with the children thinking about what their dream machine could be, or some children have different ideas as multiple ideas, and they make a drawing and they think about how it should look like, if it’s small or big, how it should function. And this is, by the way, I didn’t mention this before, the step one, step two, step three, and my machine are not divided steps. So the university students are there in the primary class when the ideation happens, so they can have this conversation with their customer, because the children here are their customer. And by the way, they are a brutally honest customer. So it’s just so magnificent. You can learn so much from that type of customer. And so they need to engage with that customer and understand what this customer is asking for. And then the university students walk away from the primary class, go to the university, and they start conceptualizing.

Piet Griemonprez [00:06:47]:
And what we do is, with my machine, we challenge those university students not just to come up with one potential solution or design, but we actually challenge them to come up with multiple potential designs, sometimes three, sometimes four or five. It even happens that we challenge them to come up with ten different designs. And then we simulate a meeting as if we were a production company, where it’s not an exam, it’s a meeting where we invite stakeholders of my machine. So those could be, of course, university professors are there. For example, teachers from the vocational secondary level schools are there because they will be engaged in step number three, the production of the prototype. Other people would be there and we, as my machine coordinators, would be there. And we have an open discussion on those different concepts, where we discuss the pros and cons of each of those concepts. And then collectively, together with the university students, we decide, for example, that their concept number three or their concept number seven would be the one that we should go for.

Piet Griemonprez [00:08:00]:
And then the university students know that this specific concept that has been collectively chosen, that’s the one that they need to elaborate a lot further. And in that elaboration, they will create feedback loops to the customers, to the primary school children, so that they can give feedback on the bigger picture or even details about the concept, like which colors they want to use, or some functionalities. And then there is sort of what we call a work in progress event, which is hosted at the university. The primary school children then visit the university. For most of them, this is the first time in their life that they can actually visit a university. And some of those children call this the school of inventors, and they then can give some final feedback to the university students. And this will probably be the first time that these primary school children will then see that they were actually not the only class joining, that there were actually also other classes joining from other primary schools, perhaps even from other cities. And so they are able to give feedback not just on their own dream machine that’s being built, but also on the other dream machines that are being built from the other classes, from the other cities even.

Piet Griemonprez [00:09:30]:
And then this progresses into step number three, the making of an actual prototype. Again, the primary school teachers are invited to this vocational technical secondary school so that they can actually see how a production of a prototype is actually taking place. How do woodworking machines look like? Or metal working machines, or rapid prototyping machines. They can actually even help out in producing some parts of the dream machine. And then in the end, we run an exhibition where we showcase all of the results, starting from the original drawing of the child, the scale models built by university students, and of course, the actual working prototype. And this exhibition is a please do touch exhibition. And so they really need to test these prototypes. And so that’s the whole progression of from idea to the prototypes.

Cyndi Burnett [00:10:24]:
That just sounds like so much fun. I want to try it myself. So I’m curious, how many times have you done this? And what are some of the sort of things that you expect from these youngsters who have these dream machines? What are some of the things that typically come up? And what are some things that surprised you?

Piet Griemonprez [00:10:42]:
I can’t even think about it. It frightens me. We started my machine, I think, something like 13 or 14 years ago already. We started growing my machine outside of Belgium in 2015. So that’s more recent. But we’ve seen thousands and thousands of ideas popping up. Some children take the opportunity to invent something personal for others. It’s something they want to invent to help out a family member.

Piet Griemonprez [00:11:16]:
Sometimes there’s ideas about their community and there’s children that come up with ideas to tackle one of the United nations development goals or global issues. So it really ranges from a very personal to a global scope because of the open ended question that we posed to them at the beginning of our methodology. And so children come up with great ideas in terms of helpful machines or fun machines or fantasy machines. They invent, for example, the homework making machine, because they don’t like to do homework themselves, so they want a machine to do it for them. The clean up my room machine, the talk about emotions machine. We’ve learned through my machine that there is a worldwide problem which is caused by bunk beds, that immediately you have a discussion going on who gets to sleep on top. And so these children invented a rotating bunk bed, so you never have to discuss anymore who gets to sleep on top because it keeps on rotating. At some point you’re down below, and the other, some seconds later you’re on top.

Piet Griemonprez [00:12:24]:
And so that worldwide problem has now been solved by these children or the jump to the moon machine, or I could go on forever, actually. So it’s fantastic. But what we do see is something that, in the legacy of Sir Ken Robinson, something that he showed us, which is that as we grow old, we tend to lose the ability to think creative. And Sir Ken Robinson even said, we are educated out of it. But what we see is that there’s a tipping point. At the age of, in general, I would say the age of nine or ten, we see that children below the age of nine, not all of them, but typically would come up with ideas that are really imaginative. For example, to jump to the moon machine, and then starting at the age of nine or ten, then those young people would not all of them again, but typically would invent more practical machines, like the clean up my room machine or the do everything machine or the homework making machine. So we do see that the pure fantasy is that as they reach the age of ten, somehow is a little bit lost and it becomes more practical.

Piet Griemonprez [00:13:43]:
That’s very much a trend that we see.

Matthew Worwood [00:13:47]:
That last point is a very fascinating thing to note because it’s around a time in which other studies have noted changes in a child’s relationship with the school and the classroom environment. I’m just curious, do you adapt your program to try and continue to foster that fantasy piece, or do you kind of continue to just run with the changes that are obviously occurring in that age group?

Piet Griemonprez [00:14:16]:
We’re not interfering. So we keep true to the mission that we’ve set for ourselves, meaning that it’s open ended, and we listen to the child, what’s important at that moment in their life. So, no, it’s not that we ask older children then, to come up with something different or remind them that they can also invent something very. With a lot of fantasy? No, we don’t do that. We just go along with the ride. We go along with what they want to see build.

Cyndi Burnett [00:14:47]:
When you hit that age of ten, you start to realize that you feel vulnerable in front of your peers, and that’s really when the peers piece comes out, and you don’t want to share a crazy and wild idea, like, let’s come up with a machine that’s going to go to the moon because you don’t want anyone to laugh at you. Right? So I think it’s really interesting. How could we build that in to, say, middle school curriculum, to allow students to take a risk and come up with those sort of silly and wild ideas and for others to accept those? So I think it’s about teaching kids about openness and risk taking, even when it means that they might feel a little bit know.

Matthew Worwood [00:15:30]:
Cindy, I want to pick up on that point because just a few weeks ago, I was conducting an ideation session in one of my classes, and it was a design thinking unit. And why I said to myself is I really want to try and use this week to generate some new and very different ideas in response to the problem. And I got to a point where I said, everyone, share with me your most wild and wacky idea. The groups shared with me their most wild and wacky idea. And I said, these aren’t wild and wacky ideas. These are either ideas that already exist or they’re ideas that we probably could do. I said, someone take, let’s take 510 minutes to come up with a really wild and wacky idea. And so we had to keep sharing wild and wacky ideas and I had to keep encouraging them to go more and more extreme.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:19]:
But once they suddenly went and had an extreme idea, I started to notice a few different changes or observe a few different changes. One, they all started to giggle and laugh a little bit more, generating more ideas than they had generated before. And at the very end, obviously, what we could then do in the next session was we took the wild and wacky ideas and were able to start kind of doing the bullseye technique, where you try and get them to say, right, well, this is a wild and wacky idea. Now, you can’t necessarily spray paint the moon and use the moon as an advertising technique, but what might we do? I don’t know if you’ve got any thoughts around this, Pete, but this idea of kind of like utilizing wild and wacky ideas and fantasy as almost like a tool to try and generate new and very different ideas. I mean, for example, is it helpful if a six year old is working alongside a twelve year old just to try and assist them in producing more wild and wacky ideas?

Piet Griemonprez [00:17:16]:
Well, we see that happening every day. Where indeed, because of the wild idea sometimes that those young, those six and seven year olds still have is that they also challenge the university students when they need to translate that into a concept, they’re also challenged by that. And I’ll give you an example. I remember this university student, like, I think, three years back, something like that, and his name is Victor in Slovakia. And he said, well, I learned so much from my machine assignment, but the most pivotal moment for me was when I returned to the primary class and I said to those children, you know what we have a problem, and the problem is called gravity. And the children were responding to Victor, this university student, and said, you know, victor, this gravity thing, that’s your issue, deal with it. And he said, that was just so fantastic. I was, again, being the adult coming up with reasons why something could not work, instead of the children saying to him, actually, like, if you come to us, you come with solutions and you don’t come with reasons why something will not work.

Piet Griemonprez [00:18:35]:
And in my opinion, that’s a strong message and it’s a strong context. Referring to what you both said, Matthew and Cindy, is that this is about the core of my machine, why we are doing it. And it’s about showing young people, and with young people, again, I mean, primary, university and secondary level students, is that having ideas is important and fun, that you should never be afraid to share your idea. Even if it sounds challenging to somebody else, don’t be afraid to share it. And we actually show them that you can bring any idea to life, and that you can do it by collaborating, by respecting each other’s talents, by being persistent when necessary, by being resilient when necessary. And no matter where life takes them, if they want to become a dancer, a photographer, an architect, an engineer, a startup entrepreneur, it all starts with having the creative confidence that your ideas matter, that your ideas actually can make a difference. And we see this as an adult. I’m not sure if you’ve been in this situation where, for example, as an adult in your office or something where you were working, you were the one expressing an idea, and then probably within 30 seconds, you would get all the reasons why your idea won’t work.

Piet Griemonprez [00:19:55]:
Somebody will say the deadline, somebody will say budget, somebody else will say legislation, somebody else will say, I don’t think there’s a market for this kind of product or service. So you get all the reasons why your idea will not work. What happens is that in that typical setting, is that if this happens a second time, is that almost all people turn silent because you don’t want to be labeled as the one, Pete, that’s the one with all these silly ideas that we as a company don’t know what to do with. And so you don’t want to get that label. And what happens is you turn silent. And this is a context in which lots of organizations and companies and the society at large is losing, is shutting down avenues of lots of great new ideas that could pop up and actually have potential for new or renewing products and services and processes. It’s about lots of organizations and companies that are not creating a context in which ideas are allowed to grow, in which ideas are allowed to grow. And that goes back to the wild ideas being probably being judged within 2 seconds, like, well, that’s a wild idea.

Piet Griemonprez [00:21:09]:
There’s nothing we can do about that. For example, the jump to the moon machine. We’re not saying to the children it’s impossible to jump to the moon. That’s a stupid idea. Give us another idea. No, we don’t do that. We say, okay, if you want to build a jump to the moon machine, let’s do this. And what you need to do is not judge that idea, but actually giving that idea the time to grow and looking for an angle in which you can actually do this.

Piet Griemonprez [00:21:32]:
And of course, the solution for that kind of ideas is that you use the imagination of the customer, the child, as if it is jumping to the moon. And then all of a sudden, instead of panicking, the university students then understand, okay, now there’s lots of possibilities that I can come up with for creating a concept for this jump to the moon machine, and it’s because I didn’t judge the idea within 3 seconds.

Cyndi Burnett [00:21:59]:
How do teachers who are listening to the podcast get involved with the work that you’re doing with my machine? Are they able to do it on their own? Are they able to download things from your website?

Piet Griemonprez [00:22:10]:
Well, there’s two things we offer. One is that we grow our nonprofit organization by looking for collaborations in different countries. It’s through franchising. So we look for a partner that is interested in setting up this typical my machine collaboration between primary, university and secondary level in their own region or country. And so as we speak, we have 13 my machine chapters up and running. So if you are a teacher in a country where we already have a chapter up and running, of course the best thing you can do is connect to that local chapter and participate through that chapter in my machine. If you are a teacher who is working outside the context of our existing chapters, then there’s a second thing we do and we call this my machine dreams drop. What it is, it’s an online world map on our website where we invite actually anybody, not just children but adults alike, to invent your dream machine and upload it to the world map.

Piet Griemonprez [00:23:18]:
And if you do it, it uploads it to your specific location on the world map. And once a year we run a call for participation specifically for primary school teachers around the world to join with their class and they can run the ideation. So step number one, using some do’s and don’ts and templates that we offer them for free and they can do the ideation. And then the teacher, the primary school teacher uploads those dream machine ideas to this world map. And then we pick some of those ideas and we connect them with university students in different countries and they produce a proof of concept. So this my machine dreams drop is, if you will. It’s sort of like a my machine light. It’s step one and step two.

Piet Griemonprez [00:24:08]:
It’s not step number three, but it allows us to also engage with, especially primary school teachers who are outside of the scope of our existing chapters in the different countries where we’re active.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:23]:
That sounds fantastic. Thank you for that information because I know there’s going to be a lot of teachers checking it out and I love the options to get involved in different ways. Before we go into our final question, I would love to know, Pete, what would your dream machine be?

Piet Griemonprez [00:24:38]:
To be honest, I’ve got a few, but the one that pops up regularly with me is a machine to make colorful shoes for men. Because I do think if you look at shoes for men, they are either black or brown and there’s not a lot of creativity going on there and I love to have some different types of shoes.

Cyndi Burnett [00:25:01]:
So Pete, we wrap up every show with the question, what three tips would you provide to educators to help them bring creativity into the classroom? Or if you’d like to focus on bringing your concept of my machine into their classroom, we’d love to hear any ideas that you have.

Piet Griemonprez [00:25:17]:
Honestly, I feel a bit, let’s say, overwhelmed by the question because we are so fortunate to collaborate with educators in so many countries, seeing that they are doing such a great work and great effort. And some of them really are amazingly creative doing wonderful things in their classroom. So I’m not really sure whether or not I’m in a place where I could give some advice to educators, but makes me think about perhaps some of my personal thoughts, which is one I do admire and it’s inside the my machine model, an open ended approach. So whatever it is that you want to do with your students, why not challenge yourself as an educator and see, can I do this with an open ended approach? Instead of just me deciding, let’s talk about this or this or that in the classroom. So challenge yourself as could it be open ended? The other thing is we see a lot of organizations out there that if they want to do something and do something wonderful, lots of them are using the technique of creating a competition. And this is also part of the my machine model, which my machine is not a competition. We are not looking for the best tree machine, whatever that would be, or something. No, we just want all students involved to be.

Piet Griemonprez [00:26:56]:
All of them should be winners. We want all of them to learn through the process. And so I would challenge lots of educators, and not just educators, but also other organizations out there, like, why not take a different route instead of the competition route? It’s not that we are against competition, but there’s enough competition out there. And so I think I would put that as a challenge as well. And the final thing would probably be that I would love us all involved in education and even outside of education, to embrace what I call systems thinking, which is explaining to ourselves and as educators, also to our students that the world we live in is complicated. And that is very much okay. And that is how it should be, because nature is complicated, because education is complicated. The car manufacturing industry is complicated.

Piet Griemonprez [00:27:53]:
Healthcare is complicated. And all of these sectors, all of these industries are complicated in itself, and they are also collaborating with each other, interfering with each other, and all of these industries together we call society. So it’s just a given that our society is complicated, and that’s okay. And to navigate in that complicated context, you need to do systems thinking, which means that you allow yourself to understand the system you’re part of. And that helps you in finding simple solutions, because it’s not because you accept complexity that it means that you need to go through complex solutions. No, but it’s by accepting the complexity of it all that you can actually find a really simple solution. And I’d love the education system to stimulate students to accept this complexity and to use systems thinking instead of just trying to figure out in the quickest way possible the simplest solution, which is oftentimes a very wrong solution. So it’s accepting complexity, and you can find a solution because of that.

Cyndi Burnett [00:29:15]:
Well, thank you so much, Pete, for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and your perspective, and we love the work that you’re doing with my machine. So this concludes this episode of the fueling Creativity and Education podcast. If you have questions about this episode or past or future episodes, you can reach out to us at questions at. So thank you for joining us. I’m Dr. Cindy Burnett, and my name.

Matthew Worwood [00:29:39]:
Is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:29:41]:
This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dabsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusefzade.