After the course, silence has not yet reached the classes. The joy of Summer Camps It becomes contagious and makes anyone want to become a child again just to be able to race with robot cars, dive in the company of fun mechanical swimmers or take the controls of a spaceship made of cardboard, recycled material and electronic connectors. to be the first to reach Mars.
It is most refreshing to discover that the fun this time depends on ourselves, to see that we can shape our dreams with our hands and our mind. Without the need to plug in, connect, or isolate yourself. We can literally create a new world in the company of our friends and classmates, made of enthusiasm, adventure, experiments and a lot of perseverance. Moving forward until you achieve what you set out to do is a wonderful learning experience that strengthens our mind and gives us greater confidence in our abilities. A true lesson for life.
One more year - this time yes - we will open the school windows wide to let the classrooms and ideas air out. The truth is that we all needed it, especially in a year like this. When we look out, we will also see the course that awaits us just after the summer holidays. In many aspects it will possibly remind us of the previous one: coexistence in bubble groups, hygiene protocols, the adaptation of projects to the availability of spaces and equipment...
With one big difference: limitations have taught us, at any age, to get the best out of ourselves, to trust in our own resources and to be more aware, also when learning.
Engineers of new futures
When at IGNITE we consider, from a STEAM pedagogical vision, what learning can be most relevant and significant for young builders of futures, we have no doubt that soft skills - especially creativity and communication - occupy a very special place. Technology helps us to develop them, to apply them transversally, to convert computational challenges into authentic circuits of “mental fitness”, but this model is incomplete without something as basic as a purpose. Although many of our students will not become technologists when they grow up, virtually all of them will be intensive users of technology. Their ability to transform the world around them, to create new business models, to establish other rules of the game, will grow exponentially at the same pace as the digital society. And as any superhero knows, with power comes great responsibility.
It is therefore necessary to raise awareness from a young age and help them understand that any change, no matter how small, has an unpredictable impact in the future. It's good to get used to thinking: what purpose will what I'm creating be used for? Will it be useful for everyone? Will it help the world be better, or just the opposite? Is there a way to do it in accordance with Nature?
Conscious technology
IGNITE's commitment to education, as a responsible organization, is based on the integration of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) promoted by the United Nations in its STEAM projects. In many of the gamified narratives and challenges that we have been successfully introducing during the past year, we will find elements that raise awareness about the environmental impact, such as the preservation of terrestrial and marine biodiversity, but they also invite us to reflect as architects, engineers or technologists about of the best models for our cities, obtaining energy in an affordable and sustainable way or ensuring the supply of drinking water.
Everything is connected to everything, and in the same way that it is impossible to turn the page on a global pandemic without stabilizing the health situation worldwide, we will not be able to avoid the depletion of natural resources or global warming without proposing new models of production and consumption. .
For several years now, the educational community has been fully aligned in the transmission of the SDGs in the most significant way possible, an effort to which IGNITE joins with enthusiasm, integrating its projects into the educational strategies of schools in the pre-school and curricular spheres.
New formats in educational innovation
An interesting example of integrating the SDGs into STEAM educational projects is Health Guardians 2030, a challenge promoted by the Pfizer Foundation with the collaboration of IGNITE Serious Play to raise awareness among students about the importance of the SDGs and, specifically, SDG3 dedicated to healthy habits and global well-being. The chosen formula has been the creation of an immersive virtual world in Minecraft designed following a careful gamification strategy to hybridize scientific dissemination and entertainment content.
In this way, participants have adopted an active role in learning, working collaboratively as a team and deploying key skills for their future such as computational thinking, problem solving and critical thinking.
In this edition, nearly 700 students and more than 150 teams from educational centers in Spain have participated in the challenge, providing imaginative solutions and learning with the help of various renowned experts by asking their questions in online sessions.
Throughout the 2020-21 academic year, at the level of educational innovation, the experience IGNITE English. Answering the question of whether it is possible to learn English from within a video game, students at various levels of Primary School have been improving their linguistic and conversational competence in the English language by exploring and developing their creations in Minecraft. It is surprising to see how the very characteristics of these virtual environments favor the learning of grammatical and syntactic concepts in everyday, hypothetical or even fantastic situations. Collaborative work and sharing of results contributes even more to the consolidation of language management.
After such an intense course, in every sense, the IGNITE pedagogical team continues to extract and analyze the many learnings obtained to develop new educational projects with which we hope to surprise you when you return from vacation.
Until then, we wish you a fantastic techno-summer!
