All Rights Reserved. Dr. John P. Craven remembers what it was like to be in the fifth grade. He remembers the boundless imagination and the feeling that anything is possible in the future. Craven grew up to serve aboard the U.S. Navy's own Nautilus submarine and to investigate U.S. naval accidents around the world. So Craven decided he needed to find some fifth-graders who still had active imaginations unchecked by the skepticism of adulthood.
Innovation always starts with the young.
He calls his theory an organic process that sprouts in the minds of children and grows with them into their adulthood. However, before Craven could find his fifth-graders, the Wauwatosa students found him. In 1992, after reading a newspaper article about Craven's floating city models, teacher Mary Weinfurter decided to turn the idea into a class project. As part of their research into floating cities, each student in the class wrote a letter to Craven at the University of Hawaii, asking him to tell them more about his floating city. Mai Xiong asked.