Lula García Vázquez

Creativity as a Way of Learning

María Lourdes “Lula” García Vázquez entered the world of educational innovation guided by curiosity and intuition. She always sensed that learning had more to do with exploring than with repeating. Following that instinct, she became a computer systems engineer and later completed postgraduate studies in educational technology. For 34 years now, she has been devoted to teaching, much of that time spent pushing the boundaries of what can happen inside a classroom.

In 2002, she began working in educational robotics, at a time when the term was barely circulating in Latin American schools. Her work has focused on opening pathways: for students who discover they can build, program, and make mistakes without fear; and for teachers who come to understand that technology is not an end in itself, but a language. A maker at heart, Lula works from a “learning by doing” approach, where error is not punished, but valued as part of the process.

A specialist in STEM, Scratch, self-directed learning, and creative classroom technologies, she has designed projects that aim for more than content delivery: they seek to spark curiosity, autonomy, and critical thinking. She has led educational innovation processes in schools—particularly in Mexico—and promoted pedagogical reflection through institutions such as the Latin American Institute for Educational Communication.

Her career includes international collaborations with organizations like Blythe Yourself in Cambridge and connections with the MIT Media Lab ecosystem. She has also accompanied student teams to robotics competitions in the Netherlands and Spain, showing that creativity can compete—and win.

A declared fan of digital citizenship, robotics, artificial intelligence, and everything that smells of STEAM, Lula continues to defend a simple yet radical idea: education works best when it looks less like instruction and more like shared exploration.