FUTURE is unpredictable. According to a research, 65 per cent children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that do not exist yet.

I founded and launched a STEM-based, project-based learning project ‘Innovate Your Dreams’ which aims at teaching jobs of the future, Sustainable Development Goals by the UN and role of technology in the transformative world.

This campaign was started by a Facebook post about the announcement of the project on my personal account. The project has been designed for seven to 16 years old school students. After the first week of its launching, it became viral on social media and kindergarten to university students began participating.

Within two weeks, more than 2,000 schools and teachers along with 100,000 plus students from over 50 countries registered to participate in the project. Many former and recent global teacher prize finalists by Varkey Foundation are also participating in the project along with their students. Currently, the eight-week project is in the fourth week. Some leading countries Japan, Malaysia, Australia, and the United States are also participants.

Students of schools as well as universities, invented some amazing jobs such as delivery drone, flying bikes (cabs), online doctor finder, urban farmers, animal cloner, asteroid miner, happy maker, and personal productivity person (a very important job to make people stop spending too much time on the Internet and devote more time to follow their passion).

Not only the leading countries, but also the countries where schools do not even have infrastructure such as Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda and most importantly Gaza, Palestine, are among the participants.

A walk is also held by the high school teachers and students from Montenegro to promote the project.

I urge Prime Minister Imran Khan to integrate this project into public schools. I offer my time voluntarily for public schools of Islamabad to monitor and integrate this project into the curriculum.

Khurram Shehzad
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, February 21st, 2019