Innovation is the focus of the newest section on the Science Learning Hub. Launched mid year, there are now three stories published – YikeBike, BioSpife, and Zealong Tea. Each story explores a contemporary New Zealand innovation from a science and technology viewpoint.

What’s in an Innovation story?

Each Innovation story features the innovator(s) telling the story of their innovation. Their stories reveal insights into the development of cutting-edge technologies addressing local and global issues. For teachers and students, these stories provide relevant and engaging examples to explore Technological Knowledge and the Nature of Technology across a range of contexts.

Supporting each Innovation story is a selection of articles, activities and shorter video clips. The articles provide more detail about the innovations, key science or technological concepts underpinning them, profiles of key people and the organisations involved. The activities focus on developing an understanding of innovation. Video clips capture the innovators' ideas about innovation, skills and attitudes that are important, and how they can be developed and fostered in young people. They also have prompts to use as discussion starters or for engaging students in deeper thinking.

Using Innovation stories in your classroom

Innovation stories have multiple entry points, allowing teachers to tailor the resources to their needs. Jo Collyer used the Innovation resources to support the whole-school Term 3 Science and Technology ‘Innovation’ theme at St Francis Xavier Catholic School in Whangarei. Jo found the Hub’s resources provided an excellent starting point for planning activities for her class. She commented: “I don’t think I could have done innovation justice without them. There was so much I could immerse the class in – to find it all separately is really hard on teachers’ time, so to have it all in one place made it so easy to find everything.”

Jo’s students were particularly motivated by the introductory video, which features children talking about innovation: “That [video] really set the scene for what innovation is and that it’s about children being the future of innovation, and so that’s where it starts, within the primary school situation, so that they can understand they can be innovators,” says Jo.

The video helped them understand key ideas about innovation and provided a framework for exploring examples of innovation, including those in the Innovation stories. Read more about how Jo used the resources in the site’s Teacher snapshot.

The next Innovation story is due before the end of the year and more are being planned for 2014.