Creativity and Innovation
The schools’ vision is to increasingly engage and empower all of our students of every age, in experiences that develop their creativity and innovation skills. We want them to be able to solve real-world challenges. This vision includes constantly developing and upgrading programs and learning spaces to enhance students’ chances to do and learn in context and to create space for students to imagine new realities.
Beyond readiness for college and employability in the future, we aspire to develop our students as positive change agents by nurturing a spirit of entrepreneurship, founded in social responsibility to make the world a better place. By learning to innovate and to value failing forward as part of their learning process students at BFIS think more flexibly across disciplines and see multiple iterations of their ideas and learning products as success.
Design Technology
We want students to identify with real world problems and to empathize with the experience of those affected by the problem. We want them to then define problems that they are passionate about solving. Our design lab is a place where students can ideate, prototype, test and implement their ideas. A place where they can reflect on their process and product and reiterate ideas and solutions. A place where they can work as an individual and as a team. Purposefully designed spaces catalyze this Design Process and will be expanded through the realization of our new Center for Creativity and Design Building. However, this mindset and the learning it nurtures, is what we want to see in all classrooms across the school at all grade levels.
Robotics and Technology
Technology specialists and engineers are currently the most sought-after professionals in the European and US economy. Our existing and emerging programs offer students curricular and co-curricular robotics experiences, programming, 3D design, CAD/CAM, app development, entrepreneurship, digital design and art and coding. Through access to modern maker tools and competition teams, prototyping the use of robotic parts to find solutions to problems is a wonderful way for students to ‘fail forward’. Robotics mirrors the problem solving, logic and technical skills that underpin jobs of now and the future. Students learn how science, engineering, math and technology work together and interact. Technology can turn frustration into problem solving and innovation and teaches our students perseverance and determination when faced with challenges.
The Arts
Children naturally communicate through artistic expression and we are committed to keeping this fundamental human thought process and expression alive. Ensuring that we intentionally create learning space in the arts subjects and infuse them across the curriculum means that we will continue to nurture students’ creative courage, self esteem, risk-taking, and collaborative skills until their graduation from BFIS and for the rest of their life.
Elementary, High School and Middle School drama, band and choir represent extra and co-curricular opportunities to complement a growing infusion of the arts in interdisciplinary lessons. We continue the strategic expansion of access to a growing number of arts courses that we offer.
“It is precisely the lack of explicit objectives determined by external parties that fascinates children.”