The Year of Discovery

Abstract

Education is currently seen worldwide as the most desirable path for people to earn a decent living and to reach personal growth and happiness. It is generally agreed that educated people not only get higher incomes but also contribute considerably to business innovation, productivity and national economic performance. Recent evidence also indicates that educated people can make decisions that help to get healthier and longer lives. So, it is possible to say that education can help to get success, health and happiness. This is the desire of all human beings and education is a great part to foster human welfare. Another aspect about education is that there is a strong and direct relationship between investment in education, educational achievement and economic growth. These facts lead to the need to work on improving the quality of basic education or K12, mainly concerning basic knowledge in literacy, numeracy and the development of essential life skills. However, it is necessary to deliver a high-quality education with comparatively low spending. Therefore, public education, which should provide equal education access for all citizens, has to find ways to do so. The Education Research Team of COPEC has designed and implemented what has been named as K12 School Adventure Plan for a city, which challenge is to provide better and effective knowledge for young students even for those who will not enter University. The main goal is to help encourage more bright young minds to pursue careers in engineering and/or technology by providing K12 students of public schools of the city the necessary knowledge about sciences and research methodology in a way that will remain as a life practice. It fits to the necessity of the country to improve competitiveness in technology growth that has implications for workforce development as well as science and technology development.