TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Michele Di Paola
The TC had the aim to present and make the participants experience the makers' culture and approach to technology, in order to apply it in local educational environments.
It had been designed to foster youth enterpreneurship and digital competences and to learn about new possibilities of using technologies with a higher rate of knowledge and protagonism.
Most of the organizations were involved with technology and youth protagonism in their local contexts so this was a chance for them to learn about new tools, methods and ways to do their job.
The group was made of 20 youth workers / teachers / makers between 18 and 35 coming from 10 different countries: Greece, Denmark, Turkey, Romania, Portugal, Estonia, Finland, Spain, France, Poland.
Participants experienced what we were talking about, trough a wide set of non formal activities and sessions:
we used technology to create things together, for instance we worked on designing a quiz about our different Countries and the EU, and creating connected objects (vegetables, chairs, etc) to be pressed / touched / sat upon in order to gain the right to answer the question, then we played the game together;
We learnt about social media as tools and then we played a twitter treasure hunt all over our venue;
we visited some FabLabs in Milan and tinkered with 3d printers and other tech-toys together with the owners of the spaces;
every day there was time for some participants to offer some activity to the group, be it the presentation of an hackerspace in Athens, of a recycling-design factory in Spain etc. in order to promote peer learning and self directed learning.
We were successful in explaining and showing to participants different ways and approaches to technology in educational (either formal and nonformal) activities, in sharing the Do It Yourself / Do It With Others approach and other pillars of the makers' world, in promoting concepts like open source hardware and software, in sharing tools and best practices on how to make technology more friendly and usable in everyday life.
I designed and delivered the training course as main trainer during the whole activity period. I had the role of creating all the different tasks and activities proposed to participants, and coordinate other trainers' interventions.