Smart Quest by Smart Pakistan Insights Network is a new age rebooted version of our combined education initiatives over the last almost three decades of work. SQ is a modern reiteration of the work we did with Teachers@IT ThinkQuest Pakistan Technology Roadshows, Technology Quest on Ary, MasterMind on Ary, and as well as the Think.com program. This is a combo of training and prepping students for what the next phase in technologies would be and how this would disrupt as well as disturb their futures.
We would like to reach out to the trifecta of student bodies, their teachers as well as educational institutions from the K-1 to K-12 classes, in terms of where they need to go, what they need to do and how they need to do it in terms of emerging technologies like AI or rather generative AI, and what LLM models can do for learning.
Also we intend to tell everyone whether kids need to go into software coding or website development or digital marketing when tools will be available to them to these anyway and eventually they will be able to do most of their education through their phones or tech devices. How this affects critical thinking itself is a critical discussion that needs to be had.
And in the case of educators and academic institutions, the overall academia as well as policy makers, need to realise that the current teaching models or systems specially in countries or developing countries like Pakistan can become redundant as technologies become more easily available to not just the upper class demographics but the middle classes as and lower classes as well.
Are they prepared for that kind of disruption? Do teachers know how to best navigate through these technologies? Are their skills up to date? What do they need to know? What do schools need to do in terms of developing their subject matter? Where do they need to be? And what do parents need to actually understand when they are talking about planning their children’s future specially from mid school onwards.
Smart Quest intends to pilot with five to ten schools in the first half of twenty twenty-five and providing that the program meets with a positive response, and after all insighst and feedback has been integrated, we hope to take this countrywide with a cool group of gypsy technologists, ourselves and schools, students, parents and their teachers who are open to learning new stuff as we look at the learning of tomorrow.
