The innovation level of school leavers wasn't what it had been, and Valintine began asking colleagues throughout the world if they were seeing the same thing.
"It didn't matter which country you went to, it felt that this generation were not nearly as inquisitive or as focused on how things work - they're just quite happy to focus on the consumption of media."
Valintine says she could also see a trend in New Zealand, with students - particularly girls - shying away from science and technology subjects, at the very time when countries throughout the world were pushing those subjects.
"We've got industries that are only going to need more and more and more digitally competent graduates," she says.
"No industry is going to need less."
After talking to primary and intermediate school teachers, Valintine says she was told that unless teachers had a science or technology background, they weren't focusing on those subjects.
"It became quite apparent that the number of students who were pursuing science subjects in particular was dropping," she says. "We weren't seeing this massive growth you'd want to be seeing in the projections going forward, given the need for scientific and technology-type minded people in the future."
The solution she created was The Mind Lab, a space where children from 4 up can get hands-on with science and technology through classes in everything from robotics to unravelling the mystery of light energy.
"I'd always had a very strong technology bent to everything I did," Valintine says.
"I guess if I go back I'm a bit of a geek and science was always my thing." The Mind Lab is less than a year old and has already caught the eye of the judges of the Talent Unleashed Awards, a global innovation competition judged by business magnate Sir Richard Branson and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
It took the gong for best New Zealand start-up and is in the running for the international prize, to be announced at the end of the month.
Last month The Mind Lab also won the Engaging Youth in ICT category in the CIO Awards.
Valintine's vision for The Mind Lab has evolved as rapidly as technology itself.
Originally the intention was to focus on bringing school groups through, to pick up on subjects a teacher may struggle to deliver in their own class, either through lack of resources or knowledge.
But Valintine says some teachers told her that what she was doing was great, but it was creating a bigger gap between what students and teachers knew.
She began offering professional development classes in the evenings or for a day, leading to her "big aha moment".
Valintine says what was really needed to appreciably change the educational landscape was a postgraduate qualification.
You could either educate 30 children at a time, or train one teacher to get the same benefit long term, she says.
To make the postgraduate certificate a reality she needed to get a tertiary provider on board, and formed a public-private joint venture with Unitec to launch The Mind Lab by Unitec in early April.
"But the most important thing actually was scale." Valintine's goal is to train 10,000 teachers over the next five years, and replicating Mind Labs in other centres is very much part of that plan.
"We will never change from the model where we are teaching classes as well as teaching teachers. That to us is really the magic." The 10,000 teachers figure is what's needed to get the critical mass to make a significant shift, she says.
The first 100-teacher intake for the 32-week course gets under way next Monday and will represent a range of teachers from a cross-section of schools.
The Mind Lab's cradle-to-grave approach, teaching science and technology to everyone from pre-schoolers to senior teachers, has attracted interest from overseas from day one, says Valintine.
"But actually for me it is a really personal thing.
"This is a New Zealand challenge first."
