Hello. In Session 8, I'd like to review some of the seven challenges that we presented to you and asked you to try to tackle. Seven global challenges, things that the world really, really needs and we can only crack these problems and meet these real needs for billions of people. By using real creativity by widening the range of choices. So here are the seven challenges that we presented to you at the start of the course and asked you to please think about and submit ideas for solving or meeting one or more of them. We asked you to create a new kind of restaurant. A truly new kind of restaurant, not just a place where you serve a kind of unusual food. We asked you find a way to bring the internet to the 4.5 billion people who currently lack it. Many people in the world have cell phones, for example, but they're not smart phones and they're not internet capable. How can you find a way to bring the Internet to the people who lack it, especially the children who could use it as a powerful tool for education and for learning? Google's trying to solve the problem. They've come up with the idea of the Loon, the Google balloon. But what about places where the balloon is not in sight, where the balloon doesn't exist? Can you bring Internet to the people who lack it, and how? Millions of lives are lost because people inhale smoke from indoor cooking fires. Nearly 3 billion people in the world cook over open fires and millions die each year due to indoor air pollution. We know that 12 million people die every year worldwide through cancer. But about a third as many people, like over 4 million people die from indoor smoke, indoor air pollution. Mostly they're women and children, because they're inside the hut while the men are outside working, perhaps in the fields. How can we solve that problem? How can we prevent all of these millions and millions of people suffering respiratory illness and possibly death? Electricity, over a billion people in the world have no access to electricity. Half the world's children go to schools without electricity. How can we bring electricity to children and people who don't have it? Solar cells, wind can, how can we do this? How can this, how can electricity be brought in places where there's no such infrastructure? This is an especially painful one. Every nine days in America, a baby dies or a small child from being forgotten in a locked car. And this is in the United States, this is true all over the world, in my country and elsewhere. And there are rare but tragic deaths of people who leave a child in a car for a moment. They go in to buy cigarettes or do some kind of errand, they get distracted, they forget. Cars become very warm, children die of heat stroke and suffocation. There must be a way, must be a device, must be a method in which children forgotten in cars sounds some sort of alarm. I'm already anticipating a solution. But how can we avoid children tragically dying when they're left and forgotten in cars and suffocate? Plastic bottles millions, and millions, and millions of plastic water bottles are used in the U.S. and all over the world and these bottles are not biodegradable. They go into trash bins and they go into the oceans. And they clog the ocean with plastic particles that go into fish, and then into our food chain, and cause great damage. Can you develop a beverage that is healthy, tasty, popular, and in an eco-friendly package? How can you do this and in an economical and feasible manner? And finally the seventh challenge which I split into two. We've already talked about the first part of the seventh challenge. Can you find a way to foster creativity in elementary and secondary schools? Elementary, middle and high school, while improving basic skills and knowledge in Math, Reading, and Science. Can you find a way to teach kids the basic stuff that they need to know, but at the same time spur their creativity? Can you help them with mastery of old knowledge rebellious creation of no knowledge? And above all can we prevent this terrible curve in which creativity collapses between age five and age 15? And can we level off that curve a bit and spur creativity in school as well as effective learning? There are schools who are doing this. There are schools in Finland. Finland scores very high in global achievement scores in Math and Science. And Finland is shifting its system toward a topic, process a topic and project type of learning, rather than a linear subject type of learning. Or part of this seven challenge, another possibility, recycling food. By some estimates the world wastes a half of all the food that is processed. It's thrown, discarded in restaurants and wedding halls. It's spoils, it rots, rats eat it, it's lost in transport. A great deal of food is lost. Of all this food that is produced, can you find ways of recycling food to help feed hungry people? Can you do this in a manner that meets the needs of hotels and restaurants, the regulators. The laws about food, can you do this in a healthy manner that prevents delivering spoiled food to people? How can you take all of this wasted food, and use it to feed some of the billion hungry people? These are the challenges. We're challenging you to come up with possible ideas, solutions, think about wild ideas. Think about creativity as widening the range of choices. Find ways that you can widen the range of choices for the people of the world deprived of good education, electricity, Internet, clean air in their village huts, and so on. As a method of making your life richer and more meaningful can you make people happy, using your brain, using your neuroplastic brain? That becomes better, and better, and better at solving problems. The more problems you tackle, and the more you use the creative parts of your brain. This ends Session 8. In Session 9, we'll go on to talk about testing your creativity. We're coming to the end of our course together, part one discovering ideas. And my promise to you, my claim to you was that if you take the course, do the exercises, do the thinking, read the book, you will become a more creative person. Now it's time to test that. We'll do that in Session 9.
