IoT-based Life Is the Best Environments for Learning -- Entering the Educational Business with the Panasonic School

The Panasonic School provides creative learning programs where children learn while making things based on their own creativity.A key feature is that it encourages the children to take the lead using trial and error and creative deviance. But it's difficult for elementary school students to do creative learning by themselves, so our programs involve both parents and children. The parents oversee and support their children to foster their independence and creativity for five or ten years later. We also hope that bringing the parents in will build parent-child relationships that allow them to constructively imagine what might be good for the future. Another key point is how IoT consumer electronics are used as part of the learning process.

Children nowadays don't have so many chances to go through the process of making something they've imagined themselves into reality through trial and error. So they end up becoming adults without having experienced failure. The result is a lack of people capable of taking on challenges. This is one factor why it's hard to create innovation in Japan now.

We wanted the Panasonic School to be a place allowing learning by trial and error through repeated challenges and failure, to develop the ability to cope with this uncertain age.

The power of the imagination. The educational theory put forward by Mitchel Resnick, who developed Scratch, contains the concept of a creative learning spiral to heighten the creativity and independence of children. That shows the ideal learning process.

Its components are to imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. I think it's important to create ways to develop the power to imagine ideas which is at the start of this creative learning spiral. Most educational materials for programming focus on games and robots. These can easily spark the imagination of children interested in robots and game creation, but it's not so easy without experience. Focusing instead on IoT consumer electronics that are part of our daily life makes it easy for anyone to access their imagination. Also, with robots and games you tend to get caught up in learning about math and physics, but food and nature can also connect to chemistry and biology. IoT-based lifestyles are the best environment to gain learning skills.

The approach of the Panasonic School can be considered to be STEAM education in terms of a multidisciplinary style of learning. But the primary feature of the Panasonic School that sets it apart from STEAM education is that it follows the creative learning spiral to inspire imagination through elements involving daily life for repeated trial and error and creative deviance.

One would be Seymour Papert, who was a professor at MIT who developed LEGO Mindstorms to use the Logo programming language in combination with LEGO blocks. For learning through daily life, he emphasized "low floors" as the area we spend most of our time in, "wide walls" as topics like food, light, and sleep, and "high ceilings" as the theoretical level where we look deeply into the other areas.

And as the IoT is applied to consumer electronics, a recipe that one child makes can be recreated at another house. In other words, this is democratizing our lives. This is an element that will create a new culture.

Adapting the IoT to consumer electronics does have the aspect of creating a culture to enjoy daily life. In our lighting business we are able on a technological level to make lights of any color, but in most cases, people use white or orange. That's a holdover from incandescent and fluorescent lights. If users control lights themselves, then anyone can design their own spaces, for instance deciding on what color to use for a certain space.
I learned about what Mr. Takata was doing through thinking seriously about creating such a culture from the viewpoint of promoting business. Education can provide experiences, values, and new insights. I asked him to work with him to create a new culture of light.

Well, of course to go out and buy our light bulbs is not the sort of thing we are going to tell people at the end of the Panasonic School t. But I think it is an essential initiative for us to concentrate on creating culture. It takes time to shift away from the stereotypical use of just white and orange for lights. In the world of music, there is a culture in place where people not only listen but also play it to enjoy the melodies and tone qualities, so in the same way I hope we can realize a world where people don't just use designs decided by someone else but also want to create their own spaces.

The Panasonic School is a business involved in more than just education. We are using areas where we excel to create a new culture in which users make their own new lifestyles. And it's also significant for making more people aware of the value of IoT consumer electronics, raising recognition of the Panasonic brand, and creating fans.

Initially I had different plans. In 2016, the year when I studied abroad, the world champion of Go was defeated by AI. People were saying that AI had gone beyond humans for things where the rules were decided, so I had doubts about studying problems with answers in the field of AI. Then I started to wonder how children would think about problems where there are no answers, and began to study topics on modeling the creativity of children. I also studied automatic programming in parallel to this.

About half a year after I'd been at MIT, another student who was also studying AI transferred to another university. Because of that I joined a study group on Scratch and education of the lab that I belonged to. Programming education itself isn't part of the business field of Panasonic so I didn't feel so engaged, but I did get interested in education through looking at its history stretching all the way back to Rousseau.

Much of the knowledge previously limited to university libraries or in corporate R&D labs can now be accessed online or by AI. Thinking of this and looking at the history of education going back to Rousseau, I felt that the age of strict rote learning for exams was over.
I became fully convinced of the need for education to allow children to use their imaginations freely. So, I began to think about a learning program that only Panasonic could provide.

The points I emphasized in creating the programs were to leave room for trial and error and to use the five senses. The cooking program using the toaster oven was the first one I thought of. While making it I knew it was important that I enjoy myself actually doing it. We're trialing other programs in addition to the three programs we are providing now, so we hope to increase them going forward.

For lighting art Mr. Takata and I decided on incorporating elements of art, so we got artists to help create the curriculum. Light is highly abstract, so we needed a program to emphasize verbalizing emotions and expressions. That's why we came up with the idea of looking at a single work as a group to share and discuss what they feel about it through dialogue. We also stressed how it was possible to play with light.

The hard part was how to explain why Panasonic should get involved in education and what children could learn by combining programming and toaster ovens. But we got support from people both inside and outside the company who shared a sense of what we were doing. Looking back, meeting them was extraordinarily lucky. Another difficulty was creating an educational policy when there is no correct way to do so. We spent around a year to decide on a curriculum that would promote trial and error and creative deviance.

For the lighting art program I'm in charge of, we have set topics but aren't bound by them. If one of the children says they thought yellow looked pretty, we'll work on making that color appear beautiful. In standard school classes that sort of deviance isn't allowed, but in the Panasonic School, we encourage children that want to bring what they have imagined into reality.

In the trial class we held in June 2021 for the lighting program, I felt it was possible to make a go of it for the education business. That was around three months after I'd started thinking about it with Mr. Watanabe, so we really started from the deep end. I'm sure I was more nervous than any of the 25 people who took part. The trial class went better than we expected, and I could see there was a lot of potential for lifestyles and education.

What left quite an impression on me was the children who went beyond our imagination. They were talking about light similarly to experts like ourselves. And that happened in the first class. We managed to create a very comfortable atmosphere free from distractions where everyone could communicate in a positive way and work in the same direction.

Where we are now is based on all those past efforts. Looking at it as it is, I don't think we could have succeeded in getting this business on its feet without my realization that life with the IoT is the perfect place for creative education. I've been lucky to enjoy the work I do for Panasonic, which of course includes the Panasonic School, but what I'm thinking of now is more a sense of mission, of what we have to do.

For me the Panasonic School is a place that allows us to do things we haven't been able to do before. We still have to find out whether it can continue on as a long-term activity of the business divisions, but I certainly want to make it a success.

Joining the curriculum gives you the chance to see times when the children change. Those are moments when you know inside that these children will eventually become adults and build new ways of life. There's nothing but hope here. What sort of value will Panasonic provide in a future filled with people who are both consumers and creators? We're heading toward a new stage. I intend to keep on working my best to ensure that my idea of focusing on imagination to enter the education field was no mistake but indeed a major realization.