WHO WE ARE
The Municipality of Silea and the Cultural and Recreational Association “Laboratorio Archimede” (Archimedes Laboratory) of Zero Branco (Treviso), in their continuous attention to the territory and its citizens, have proposed to organize a Festival on Innovation. The Festival deals with the topics of Innovation in a way accessible to everyone, whatever the degree of education, age, employment or working commitment. Labs, workshops, exhibitions, conferences, interactive sessions of scientific and technological disclosure will be held during the three day Festival in an atmosphere of participation and entertainment..
One of the goals is to let the different performers meet: people who produce, study, plan and experiment innovation. Sharing knowledge and innovation, creating meeting opportunities between schools, the world of research, business startups and the labour market, by making a network, allows to face strategic challenges such as early school-leaving, youth unemployment and the Neet phenomenon (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and to create a form of inclusive progress.
The Festival is an opportunity to investigate and find out how to acquire competitive advantages, which for our youth will result in strategies on how to learn transversal skills to respond to the speed of market change. We inspire the new generations of inventors. Schools and research centres, through projects and demonstrations, are great actors of the Festival, attentive to scientific topics and the transfer of knowledge into possible functional solutions.
For companies, startups and makers, the Festival is a place of meeting, of comparison, of visibility, of networking, because physical coexistence and direct interaction create a climate of trust that can lead to new common synergies.
Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM) are by now part of our knowledge-based society. The Festival therefore aims at inspiring scientific culture, the engine of development, even through the concreteness of artifacts, namely the Smart Innovations, and the school paths to be able to accomplish them.
Science affects men’s life in two ways. The first is familiar to everyone: directly and even more indirectly, science produces tools that have completely transformed human existence. The second is by its nature educational, acting on the spirit. However obvious it may seem a hasty examination, this second way is no less efficient than the first one. The most striking practical effect of science is the fact that it makes it possible to invent things that enrich life, even though they complicate it.
Albert Einstein, Pensieri degli anni difficili, trad. L. Bianchi, 1965
The hectic technological development of the latest years has deeply influenced our way of thinking about ourselves and the reality that surrounds us, of knowing and behaving, opening up future perspectives until recently told only by Asimov’s novels . But where will closer and closer interweaving between man and machine bring us? How far will we put into practise the possibilities that the progress of means offers to us? What relationship between science and technics, between technology and ethic?
In an attempt to contribute to give an answer to these questions, the Municipality of Silea has elaborated an organic set of projects to favour the acquisition of a critical approach to the technological culture, through the diffusion of digital proficiency as an instrument to express creativity and originality of thought. This implies the courses of computer science for adults organized with the collaboration of the University of Età Libera, the courses to handle a blog, fulfilled in the library of “Liberi pensatori”, the summer camps of H-Farm offered by the Municipality of Silea to all the children who have attended the fifth year of primary school and the Cordedojo’s laboratories, promoted by the Archimede Laboratory Association of Zero Branco.
As an international movement carried out by volunteers, the Coderdojo aims at favouring near teenagers’ knowledge of coding through the game, the mutual exchange and the peer-to-peer learning and stirring up the interest in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and maths) with funny and involving methods, such as visual planning and with Arduino, the 3D design, electronics and educational robotics.
The Festival smart innovation, born from the collaboration of Archimede Laboratory association and the Municipality of Silea, it fully fits in well with this way of thinking.
Laboratories, workshop, exhibitions, conferences, national appeal competitions will give life to a widespread festival from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th September 2017, which, in addition to the public library, will include the collaboration with the schools of the local area, start up and companies. The instructive opportunities will be addressed to children, teenagers, teachers, fans, researchers, experts and will facilitate the creation of a net to share the latest achievements of coding and robotics, thus arousing interests and debates and suggesting new possibilities of studying and working in a special way to young people. In fact, the programming and the robotics applications in the medical science and school are astonishing, while computer science literacy turns out to be an efficient means of social inclusion and intergenerational dialogue.
The Festival, furthermore, will involve the accommodation facilities of the territory as well, which will offer hospitality and favour the enjoyment of naturalistic and artistic beauties of Silea to visitors.
Rosanna Potente
Vice Sindaco Comune di Silea
The Archimedes Laboratory Association is a non-commercial non-profit association which proposes and organizes cultural and recreational activities in order to promote education, training and social and cultural animation. The Association is a permanent community life centre of voluntary and democratic nature, whose activity is the expression of participation, solidarity and pluralism.
We focused our attention particularly on the digital divide and from there we got the idea of opening the Coderdojo Zero Branco club, also to give boys and girls the opportunity to be active and creative in their approach to new technologies and not to be only passive video game and apps users anymore.
The Coderdojo is an international non-profit, open-source movement, run by volunteers, aiming at inspiring young people towards computer programming through games, mutual exchange and peer-learning. The laboratories we organize, covering visual programming, 3D design, electronics and programming with Arduino and educational robotics, contribute to inspire passion for STEAM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, art and maths), the key subjects for young people and for the development of our country.
We aim to provide our youth with the tools that make the approach to problem solving easier. This method of problem analysis can then be used in all subjects of study and afterwards in a professional, working environment.