MIT Okawa Center for Future Children

Working on the basis of a private donation received from CSK Group founder Isao Okawa, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States established the MIT Okawa Center for Future Children with the aim of further expanding the research conducted by MIT Media Laboratory (The Media Arts and Sciences building will be completed in 2009.) Using cutting-edge digital technology, the Center is working with researchers and children all over the world to study new learning styles and means of expression for the benefit of future children. MIT Media Laboratory is CAMP’s main collaborator and works to jointly develop and implement various workshops, such as the Cricket Workshop, which fuse technology and art.

Okawa Center

In April 2001, CSK (now CSK Holdings Corporation) and the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications established the Okawa Center in Kansai Science City. This facility, together with the MIT Okawa Center for Future Children, is the concrete realization of the late Isao Okawa’s idea that children should be in the vanguard for creating our information society. Using the Okawa Center as the focal point of development and implementation of workshops, CAMP deploys and disseminates various types of workshops throughout Japan.

Junior Summit[For the Key Players of the Future]

The establishment of the MIT Okawa Center for Future Children and the Okawa Center came about as a result of a Junior Summit that was held on the theme, –Key Players of the Future.” This was an international conference where children took center stage in exchanging opinions. The initial summit was held in Tokyo in 1995 and was followed up with a second summit hosted by MIT in Boston in 1998 dedicated to formulating and implementing –action plans to change the world.” These international events were held at the instigation of the late Isao Okawa, who called for their organization when he attended the G7 Ministerial Conference on Information Society.