The Inner Sydney Montessori School (ISMS) in Australia has invited Imagine Science Films to prepare a lesson for students to engage with materials found in scientific laboratories. The ImagineScope and a selection of short films will travel to Sydney, Australia in early 2012 and help train students to use a binocular microscope, as well as inspire creative engagement with accurate science through film.

Click here to see the unveiling of the ImagineScope prototype at the Maker Faire. The ImagineScope was designed by Luis Violante, a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University.

ISMS is an Association Montessori Internationale certified school that offers an inclusive education for children from birth to 12 years old. Because Dr. Maria Montessori was a scientist first, her method for teaching children is based on exploration and discovery within a prepared environment. Dr. Montessori gave the world a scientific method for engaging with young adults in a natural manner that respects individual differences.

“The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim is not only to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorise, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core. We do not want complacent pupils, but eager ones. We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind.”
— Maria Montessori

The Montessori Philosophy is an approach to education that acknowledges the child’s natural love of learning, while creating environments that foster the fulfillment of the highest potential for every child. She emphasized social interaction and the education of the whole personality rather than the teaching of a specific body of knowledge.

Maria Montessori was profoundly influenced by Fredrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, and by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed that children learned through activity.

Montessori classrooms are very different than conventional models. The materials are very carefully chosen and must adhere to strict guidelines determined by an international committee that oversees production. Instead of instructing students, Montessori teachers encourage children to think for themselves. Teachers function as guides and are skilled at putting the child in touch with the prepared study materials in their learning environments.