LIFE & CULTURE

The students of Tamagawa Academy’s handbell club studied programming and created animated works to move in harmony with sounds, thereby enablinghard-of-hearing children to experience their performance. The photo on the left shows Nakajima (front, far left) and students of the handbell club checking
their creations. MIRAI EARTH SCHOOL (steAm, Inc.)COMBINING STEAMEDUCATION WITH

In 2018, while running her own company, NAKAJIMA Sachiko was awarded a Fulbright
Scholarship to study at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where she majored ininteractive telecommunications. There, she first learned to code, finding the cyclical process ofthinking and materialization both interesting and immersive.

PLAYFULEXPLORATION

Given the high degree of change in society through developments in areas such as AI and IoT, there is an increasing needfor interdisciplinary education to resolve social issues via the comprehensive application of knowledge across the wideranging fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM). A gold medalist at the International
Mathematical Olympiad—and a jazz pianist to boot—guides us through the essence of STEAM education.
How can we experience thebeautiful tones of handbells
without relying on sound? Inorder to share their performancewith hard-of-hearing children,
students in a certain school’s
handbell club passionately started
learning about programming totranslate their handbell music
into visual animation. Children ata school for the deaf and hard ofhearing also tried programming
lights to express the high and low
tones of the music with the help ofa hearing-support device. Aided byLeft: Nakajima (back row, third from right) won agold medal at the International Mathematical
Olympiad in India in 1996 during her sophomore
year in high school.
Right: Her fascination with jazz piano while atuniversity led to her becoming a professional
pianist after graduation. At a popular mathseminar for adults, she strove to convey themathematics behind the movement of sounds andchords through hearing and vision. KIOI STEAM LAB

computer science, the two groups’
collaborative work made their wish
to share the tonal pleasures of thehandbell come true, letting themdiscover the joy of co-creation.
From such initiatives, we witness
the budding of innovation.
NAKAJIMA Sachiko, founder,CEO, and president of steAm,Inc., has been taking on thechallenge of using science andtechnology to nurture creativity.
The program introduced aboveis just one of over 40 Future
Earth School projects led by
the company under the Future
Classroom program supported by
the Ministry of Economy, Tradeand Industry to demonstrate how
students can learn to innovate.
STEAM is an approach tolearning that utilizes knowledge
from the five disciplines of science,technology, engineering, arts, andmathematics to solve problems
and create new value. In this era ofrelentless change, there is a global
demand to nurture such abilities,
and the Kishida administration
has put a concerted focus onpromoting cross-curricular learningthat transcends the boundaries

of arts and science to foster
individuals who are able tosupport our collective future.
Nakajima participated in theInternational
Mathematical
Olympiad as a high school student,
where she became the first female
Japanese competitor to win agold medal. She also harbored afascination for jazz while studying
mathematics at the University ofTokyo, and became a professional
pianist after graduating.
Nakajima uses the commonalities
between mathematics and musicthat she found through her own
background to explain the pleasure
she derives from interdisciplinary
studies and the multifaceted
perspectives of living in such avolatile and uncertain era.
“To me, STEAM represents
diversity. I find it interestingthat there is never just one
answer. It is important toremain inquisitive. Constantly
questioning what one wants to
do inspires creativity,” Nakajima
explains. “The Japanese people
have proved adept at devotedly
pursuing individual topics indepth. While cultivating expertisein each field is important—andis something that Japan has longvalued—I believe that freshviews of the world will open up
if we make connections acrossthe barriers erected between
fields of study. One can enjoy
pursuing one’s inquisitivenesswith STEAM. I consider it myjob to foster inquiring minds.
I support ‘diverse creativity’ by
establishing that initial impetus
and injecting engineering andmathematical expertise along theway to facilitate its realization.”
Nakajima also works as athematic project producer for
Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan,
whose theme is “Designing Future
Society for Our Lives.” Efforts
to revolutionize how we learn
and play to create better global
connections overlap with theworld of STEAM education.
“Think like a scientist, create
like an artist. That’s STEAM.
Persistent inquisitiveness becomesa way of living rather than simply
a way of learning. I hope to see
a future in which everyone,
including myself, enjoys an evenhappier life.”