MEMBERS & VISITORS
PREPARING A GENERATION OF AFRICAN INVENTORS
PREPARING A GENERATION OF AFRICAN INVENTORS
I am working hard to implement a real world Invention School for African youth. Given the world’s current state of affairs, the stage is now set for Africans to deeply explore solutions to African problems without being hampered by externally imposed conditions as the price for success. The purpose of my Invention School is to provide opportunities for young African apprentices to learn the processes, practices, and ways of thinking like inventors. Invention education is an emerging field that transcends disciplinary boundaries. The instructional approaches I’m implementing respond to the need for creative problem solvers who draw on expertise from multiple disciplines, cultural knowledge, and a diverse range of lived experiences to construct innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Given past African history, there is every reason to assume that the creativity and inventiveness needed to create new and novel, useful and unique solutions today to African problems is something that can be nurtured and cultivated in people of all ages and from diverse walks of African life. Inventiveness has been a part of the African persona for ages past, though suppressed during colonialism, and will continue into the 21st century and beyond if I have anything to do with it.
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Making and inventing are closely related in the sense that both involve building something to solve a problem, learning through iterative cycles of activity, and developing hands-on and technical skills through iterative activity cycles. Interactions between student team members engaged in the problem-solving processes will help apprentices develop new knowledge and skills. My intention is to make Invention School apprentices great inventors and problem solvers by teaching them about the lives and accomplishments of other great inventors. They will make patents and patent activities part of their everyday world and treat what is already known about this world with irreverence because they believe in their own creative visions and their own abilities to uncover new truths by never giving up, very often through simple play. They will be made to understand that their first inventions may not be their best and that improvement with practice is assured. They will also come to know that the fictionalized versions of Invention School graphic novels being sold worldwide has drawn considerable inspiration from their own growth and development.
Personally, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of significant early exposures to opportunities to advance. I was chosen in middle school to participate in a highly accelerated math curriculum because the U.S. needed to catch up and surpass Russia’s advanced science and technology. They were able to place the world’s first satellite in orbit around the earth. My career path took me into engineering and education. Read “How a High School Debate Team Shaped Ketanji Brown Jackson“, the first African American woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
The list of challenges that these apprentices will encounter is long indeed and this list is far from complete:
1) suitable and appropriate transportation
2) life sciences and herbalism
3) year round irrigation systems
4) new food dishes and beverages from Africa, food basket of the world
5) socially engineered cultural rejection of corruption
6) employment of rural youth
7) reverse migration to rural homelands away from control-obsessed urban centers
8) world class public education for geographically dispersed populations
9) new low carbon footprint industries
10) economic systems in which even the most marginalized can thrive
11) cultural output enjoyed by global audiences and consumers
12) sustainable population growth
13) eco friendly industries and products
14) consensus governance systems
15) food security
16) unassailable fashion advancements
17) technology narrative which addresses African values and progress
18) widespread technological literacy of Africans
19) pan African economic cooperation
20) strong families as core social units
21) liberation from cultural decadence which left unaddressed topples nation states
Prof. Oku Singer, Mechanical/Solar Engineer
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