Marcos Muller Habig

TBY talks to Marcos Muller Habig, Acting CEO of 42 Abu Dhabi, about digital transformation and the future of education.

42 Abu Dhabi is the first school of its kind in the GCC. What does the school’s curriculum aim to contribute to its students?

The purpose of the school originally was to equip Abu Dhabi’s future generations with the right skill sets and talents to contribute to the digital transformation of the Emirate. The objective of the curriculum is to ensure that our students have the digital literacy skills or 21st century skills as defined by the government, which enables them to contribute to the Emirate’s digital economy. We are the first of the 42 networks of schools; there are 47 campuses and 27 countries and we are the first in the GCC. It’s something we are proud of. The whole thrust of the curriculum and of what we do is skill-based learning. It is important to get talent that is immediately ready to contribute to the rapid growth and change that is happening in Abu Dhabi and across the UAE.


What is 42 Abu Dhabi’s methodology of learning and how does it deal with new technologies?

The methodology of learning, the backbone of what we do is peer-to-peer education, which means that students are learning from each other. It is different than having a teacher in front delivering a lecture, and is all about them learning from each other. The interesting thing is that there’s a point where you can see a group of students none of which have the answer. Yet, because they are leveraging collective intelligence, they come up with a solution. That is something that is really incredible to see, because collective intelligence is astonishing, and we leverage that extensively. It is also entirely project-based learning and the peer-to-peer methodology really does well with this approach because there are real world skills, real world scenarios, that have a beginning, a middle, and an end in every single project with a specific purpose. This helps to break down these complicated technologies into digestible chunks; these projects allow the students to focus on one theme at a time that allows them to then build the skill set. They end up learning the theory by doing. So, as they going through the projects, they learn how it should be structured or managed. Those skills actually come intrinsically from going through the projects.