Creatubbles Co-founder and CEO Paul Greenberg received both his B.S. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Technology and Policy from MIT. Before Creatubbles he served as CEO for an online learning technology company, and before that he acted as Vice President and General Manager of Digital Media for the North Asia region at MTV Networks. Greenberg’s global experience correlates with his proficiency in seven languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and English. Being a Canadian he naturally learned French and English, “I took four years of Latin in high school, which brought all the other languages together and made them easy to learn.,” explains Greenberg.
A father of two young girls, Greenberg began Creatubbles because of his desire to protect and nurture the natural creative spirit that exists in all children. Creatubbles platform reaches young people of all backgrounds and abilities and protects them from discrimination and bullying.
Launched in 2015 with a focus on 8 to 15-year-olds, children build a Creatubbles profile and share their creations including 2D or 3D images, analog or digital, video or audio files, and Minecraft creations. They upload their creations to the website’s platform, where they are reviewed and approved by Creatubbles staff before being published onto the platform. For example, I uploaded my photo of a pink rose and a movie poster. The pink rose creation received approval to join the Creatubbles' platform. The movie poster did not get approved because according to a form email, which included a link to Creatubbles Guidelines, the copyright belonged to the movie studio and was not my original work.
Users get further engaged by participating in challenges, creating galleries, commenting on other creations, or clicking “bubbles” which is similar to “likes” on other social media platforms. “By design, Creatubbles is a place where a child, anywhere, can feel comfortable and confident to share their creative output without hesitation,” explains Greenberg. “By providing a safe place to do this, children from around the world develop self-esteem that comes with the development of their own unique voice.”
Art teachers and Visual Art Coordinators use Creatubbles as part of their art curriculum. For example, a school district in Texas under the direction of the Visual Arts Coordinator worked with the Creatubbles Team to set up accounts for the majority of their students.
Greenberg is aware of the challenges in implementing Creatubbles in a classroom, school, or even school district which require managing the dynamic relationships between teachers and students from year to year and even within a given year. “We have worked hard to support schools, teachers, and students in this way by providing a flexible process for them to submit a database of teacher-student relationships, which we ingest into our system to provision and maintain accounts.”
Greenberg’s primary focus is creating the conditions that deliver value to their users, concentrating on the process of developing a team of passionate, dedicated, and highly motivated team members who care deeply about what the company provides to their users. “I try to listen to and learn from our users on a daily basis, through their words but especially their actions on Creatubbles.,” explains Greenberg. “It is most fulfilling when children validate that a place like Creatubbles is valuable and meaningful for them, through the amazing creations that they share and the amazing things that they communicate on Creatubbles.”
Greenberg designed the company based on the learning process no longer being limited by physical space, geography, or language. Creatubbles follows the trend where teacher-student relationships are no longer limited to a “one to a few” model, and transmission of information is no longer limited to a small and highly specific set of channels or a narrow set of formats. “This combined with the fact that a large part of the future competition for today’s children will not be outsourcing certain skills overseas but outsourcing to a spectrum of technologies that include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics,” explains Greenberg. “That places an extremely high importance on developing creativity. It is, perhaps, the most important 21st-century skill. Technology in the classroom is an increasingly important part of nurturing, developing, and unleashing the natural creative spirit that all children possess.”
Creatubbles enables Greenberg to carry forward his fundamental goal of helping to make the world a better place. Preparing children for this future is heavily influenced by the educational experiences that they undertake. That places a tremendous responsibility on teachers. “I believe that anything that can be done to help them be more effective, if even just by a little bit, is well worth it.”
“Children are our future, and they will encounter solving problems that are larger and more complex than most people realize or acknowledge. Our collective future depends on creating more enlightened, compassionate, and skilled future adults,” explains Greenberg.
The company’s purpose aligns with Greenberg’s goal, which is an overall desire to help the world in general. “If we can help children to develop skills through being inspired by a broad range of possibilities created by peers from around the world and being encouraged to practice with depth and focus, it can enable them to develop core problem solving skills through creativity. I define the ability as being able to produce a previously unimagined output of intrinsic value, particularly within limited constraints,” explains Greenberg. “If we can continue to develop Creatubbles as a place that encourages compassion, aesthetic appreciation, and a broader perspective, within a supportive environment, we can enable children to develop the tools to find common ground as a basis for navigating their way to meaningful solutions to future problems,” concludes Greenberg.
