Letter from our founders

Let kids create the change we need!

Guess what the World Economic Forum’s top three ‘C’ words are for 2030! Complex problem solving, Critical thinking and Creativity. We firmly believe that creative confidence forms the core of this. A term coined by David M. Kelley from IDEO and D-School at Stanford University, creative confidence means believing in your ability to create change in the world. Imagine if every child had the chance to develop this!

Everything is progressing – phones, cars, TV. So why isn’t education? Our mission for 2020 and beyond is to make creative learning first priority for all educators. We want to break down walls between education and creative learning, and help kids build answers to all kinds of problems. Even problems that don’t yet exist. We want to inspire the Greta Thunberg generation – tomorrow’s generation. With this in mind, we support the neuroscientist and author of ‘The Creative Brain’ documentary David Eagleman’s appeal for creative learning, who says: ‘The jobs that will exist 20 years from now, we don’t even have names for those yet! To succeed in the future, we need to cultivate creativity to proliferate our options to get off the path of least resistance. To take risks and, in this way, take advantage of what it is to be a human, to drink in the world and produce something, anything that has never existed before.’

Strawbees is not just another building set. We represent a mindset that isn’t afraid of the ‘f’ word – ‘fail’. We think the writer Samuel Beckett was onto something when he said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”. We believe that ‘mistakes’ contain the seeds of future success, so we say imagination not instruction! Learning by doing isn’t good enough. Learning by trying is the future.

You want problem solvers? Let kids create!

From the founders,

Erik Thorstensson                             Erik Bergelin