While today’s educational standards occasionally emphasize prediction, they rarely equip young people with the skills needed to imagine multiple futures or to plan for dynamic, changing landscapes. Yet, the notion of a single, linear life path is increasingly outdated. People now shift careers, change fields, relocate, and reimagine their lives in diverse ways. To prepare children for this reality, we must teach them that success comes in many forms—and empower them to shape their own futures. That’s why our curriculum incorporates concepts from Futures Literacy: the ability to imagine a wide range of possible futures and to use those imagined futures as lenses for better understanding and engaging with the present.

Moreover, many programs for young people emphasize making—arts and crafts or maker-space activities that focus on learning a process or following a set of instructions. While these experiences can be valuable, they often prioritize execution over imagination, and outcomes over exploration. What’s missing is a focus on Building: the open-ended act of envisioning something that doesn’t yet exist and bringing it to life. This matters because when children are given space to build rather than just make, they develop creative confidence, resilience in the face of ambiguity, and the ability to generate original ideas. At Into the Future, we encourage a culture of building through exploratory design, where the process is guided by curiosity and the outcomes are intentionally diverse. Our environment encourages a multiplicity of solutions, allowing children to imagine freely, test boldly, and build abundantly—on their own terms.

The third concept we emphasize is Interdependence—the understanding that individual success is deeply tied to the well-being of others and to the systems we all inhabit. While global history may be taught, elementary school standards give little attention to our global present or the interconnected future we are actively shaping. This is a critical omission, especially as children grow up in a world defined by complexity, climate change, technological entanglement, and social interconnectivity. Our FutureTime framework invites learners to take an expansive view of time—exploring how the past, present, and future are linked—and encourages them to examine human relationships, both with each other and with the world around them. Through this lens, children learn to see themselves not as isolated individuals, but as creative contributors to an interconnected universe.

Finally, Into the Future is committed to nurturing imagination, curiosity, and creativity in educational spaces. Imagination plays a crucial role in the cognitive, emotional, and social development of children. In the long term, a lack of imaginative thinking can result in adults who are less capable of regulating their emotions, adapting to new challenges, thinking outside the box, or solving complex problems—skills that are vital for navigating change. And, perhaps most importantly, by fostering creativity we can encourage young learners to engage in ways of thinking and understanding that they enjoy. Structural barriers to the development of this imagination muscle have mutated throughout history and across cultures. Today, those barriers often take the form of rigid educational systems and excessive passive screen use–both of which limit the open-ended, social play that nurtures imagination. 

Through our Play-Learn-Build approach, Into the Future transforms any learning environment into a space of avid creation. 

1. Play: Unstructured play gives children the freedom to explore materials and ideas in a joyful, resource-rich space, sparking curiosity and creativity. 

2. Learn: Our FutureTime lessons nurture expansive thinking, with a healthy dose of silliness sprinkled throughout.

3. Build: Children enter the flow state of creation, where experimentation and passion drive their creativity and our young learners bring their ideas to life through hands-on building.

Through this blend of freedom, abundance, and enthusiastic exploration, Into the Future turns any space into a place where imagination can truly take root and grow–along the way showing young learners how to build the future with their minds, hands, and hearts.