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The teacher of one of the participating schools during the celebration of the last edition of the Festival RetoTech_Fundación_Endesa with the president of Endesa, Borja Prado, explaining the operation of its project
- The registration period has opened to take part in the second edition of RetoTech_Fundación_Endesa, a cutting-edge tech project created by the Endesa Foundation, with the support of the Community of Madrid and aimed at promoting innovation in educational settings.
- This educational project forms part of the Endesa Foundation’s continuous commitment to developing projects that transform and innovate in education at all levels for students and teachers alike
The RetoTech_Fundación_Endesa, which was launched in January 2016 in collaboration with the Community of Madrid with the aim of reaching the highest number of beneficiaries, challenged all the secondary schools in Madrid to design their own integrated robotic applications to provide solutions for social problems and improve the quality of life of society in their school environment.
During the 2016/2017 academic year, 126 schools registered to take part in RetoTech_Fundación_Endesa, 51 of which were selected. In total, 1,500 students and 150 teachers benefited from this educational project. The Endesa Foundation, as part of its commitment to promote educational innovation, provided the selected schools with robotics kits and 3D printers.
This project enabled the scientific-technological side of each school to be explored and allowed teachers to identify students’ most creative and ingenious abilities, while also developing the necessary skills to work as a team, be entrepreneurs, oversee projects, manage time and make decisions.
For the 2017/2018 academic year, twenty new Primary Education centres will take part, another twenty Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) centres participating for the first time, plus twenty-five that already formed part of the previous edition. In total, 65 centres in the Community of Madrid.
The schools and institutes selected in the first call will receive ten robotics kits and a 3D printer and those taken part for a second-year running will receive ten robotics kits. The teachers taking part will also be able to attend three training courses and they will receive professional support for carrying out their work. All the selected centres will prepare and present their technology projects in the RetoTech_Fundación_Endesa Festival, which will be held at Endesa’s headquarters during the third trimester.
A briefing for the 2nd edition of RetoTech will be held on 25 September in the San Isidro Secondary School, located at calle Toledo 39 in Madrid, which will be attended by the Deputy Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Cristina Álvarez Sánchez, and the Head of Projects at the Endesa Foundation, Begoña Muñoz de Verger, to explain all the details of this competition. The registration period shall remain open until 6 October.
The Community of Madrid is firmly committed to innovation and new technologies, with pioneering initiatives such as being the first Autonomous Community to introduce the subject of Technology, Programming and Robotics into schools last year. The Madrid Government will invest a total of 16 million euros until 2018 to introduce this subject into all the Secondary Education centres in the region.
The regional Government, headed by Cristina Cifuentes, ended the 2016/2017 school term with the subject of Technology, Programming and Robotics included in the four years of compulsory Secondary Education, enabling over 200,000 students to study these subjects in public, private and state-assisted centres in the region.
The Community of Madrid is pressing to include subjects involving programming and robotics at primary level, as is the case in other countries such as Estonia and the United Kingdom. The benefits of introducing programming knowledge at an early age are reflected in increased creativity, the development of abstract and computational thinking, the direct application of knowledge in mathematics to real problems, etc.
Simply teaching students to be users is no longer enough; it is increasingly more useful for them to learn to be creators.
About the Endesa Foundation
The Endesa Foundation, chaired by Borja Prado, has a clear commitment to social development through its educational projects, training for employment, a commitment to the environment and cultural initiatives.
It develops educational projects, promoting initiatives aimed at transforming and innovating education at all levels and fostering academic excellence in universities through scholarships, grants and lectures.
It promotes employment training projects, focusing on the promotion of talent, aimed at people at risk of social exclusion, low-income young entrepreneurs and professionals over the age of 50.
It implements environment-related initiatives related to ecological culture education and specific projects for the improvement of natural environments and areas used for industrial purposes, which is another of the Endesa Foundation’s commitments.
Lastly, the Foundation continues to promote the illumination of historical-artistic heritage properties and promoting, restoring and preserving art and culture.
More information at: https://www.fundacionendesa.org/
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