The Future Depends on Teaching Students to Design, Not Just Consume
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By Matt Bower
What do we teach our children when machines grow smarter than us? It’s not a speculative question anymore. Generative AI is now writing poetry, building code, and even sketching architectural blueprints. If an algorithm can already ace tomorrow’s test, what—truly—is worth learning?
A new book, Creative Technologies Education – Students as Digital Designers, offers an answer both simple and radical: teach students not just how to use technology, but how to create with it. Edited by Professor Matt Bower and Associate Professor Belinda von Mengersen, this book is a collaborative effort by 45 academics to provide the research evidence and practical ideas to underpin creative technologies education.
The Classroom as Design Studio
Education policy debates often frame teaching as a tug-of-war between explicit instruction and inquiry-based learning. Should students be drilled on the fundamentals, or should they be given space to explore? This book refuses the false choice. Yes, literacy and numeracy matter; without them, students cannot participate in society. But if schooling stops there, we’re limiting the future success and satisfaction of our students.
Instead, the authors argue for a fusion of rigor and imagination. Imagine a classroom where students use augmented reality to design museum exhibits, where they prototype and code their own video games, or where they experiment with 3D fabrication technologies not just to replicate models but to dream up entirely new ones. These aren’t science-fiction scenarios—they’re real practices being applied in classrooms worldwide, documented through case studies and distilled into principles that any teacher can pick up and apply tomorrow.
Beyond the Binary of Digital and Design
In many countries, “Digital Technologies” and “Design & Technologies” exist in parallel tracks—one focused on data, coding, and systems, the other on making, crafting, and prototyping. The editors and contributors of this book see the border as artificial. Today’s design students are using CAD software and robotics; today’s coders are engaging with design thinking. The lines blur because the future demands it.
What happens, then, when these worlds truly intersect? The book insists that students can—and must—learn to be digital designers: people who can think critically, design imaginatively, and wield tools from virtual reality headsets to robotics kits with a sense of purpose and possibility.
Why This Matters Now
The timing of this book is no accident. As artificial intelligence floods workplaces and homes, there has never been a more important time to focus on creativity. The editors put it bluntly:
If new and powerful technologies will ultimately be able to perform any cognitive task that a human can, isn’t it more important that we teach our learners have some of the questions rather than all of the answers, and endow them with a desire to create rather than consume?
This is the heartbeat of the book: not a rejection of foundational knowledge, but a bold reassertion that education must go further. To read, calculate, and “know” is essential—but to inquire, design, and create is what makes us fully human.
A Collaborative Effort, Open to All
One of the most inspiring aspects of Creative Technologies Education is its collaborative spirit. Rather than assembling a loose bundle of essays, the editors coordinated a true team initiative. Each chapter group worked in sync, revising together, peer-reviewing one another, and ensuring the book would serve educators worldwide. The result is a seamlessly connected text that doubles as both research compendium and practical handbook. And here’s the bonus: the book is open-access. Anyone—whether a trainee teacher in Lagos, a robotics coach in Helsinki, or a professor in São Paulo—can download it for free. The democratization of knowledge is not just a publishing choice, but a philosophical stance: creativity should not be gated by privilege.
The Call to Educators
This book doesn’t arrive quietly. It’s a call to arms for teachers, school leaders, and policymakers to reimagine what counts as “essential” in education. It challenges us to look at our classrooms not as factories of knowledge, but as incubators of ideas.
To be sure, the path isn’t easy. Technologies evolve too quickly for any static curriculum. Creativity can be messy, unmeasurable, and difficult to grade. Yet this book provides a scaffolding: pedagogical principles, research syntheses, practical vignettes, and tested design models that give teachers both confidence and flexibility.
It reminds us that education is not just about producing competent workers for today’s economy, but cultivating imaginative citizens capable of designing tomorrow’s world.
Why You Should Read It
If you are a teacher wondering how to prepare students to be designers of tomorrow, this book offers research-based strategies and practical ideas. If you are a policymaker worried about the future of work, it presents an evidence base for why creativity is not optional but urgent. And if you are simply someone who believes the purpose of education is more than test scores, you’ll find in these pages a refreshing, hopeful vision.
Because at the end of the day, the lesson is this: our machines may be intelligent, but they cannot dream. That’s our job. And we had better start teaching the next generation how to do it well.
Creative Technologies Education – Students as Digital Designers is available now, open-access. Read it, share it, and most of all—let it inspire you to help students design futures worth living in.
Creative Technologies Education
This book is a groundbreaking exploration of how to empower students as innovative creators in an increasingly technology-driven world.
Written by a team of academic experts, this open-access resource is a must-read for educators, researchers, and anyone passionate about unlocking the creative potential of the next generation using technology. Further resources can be found here: https://creativeteched.net/resources.