Right from the beginning OpenTechSchool has been a strong supporter of the IT-Labs initiative of the Technology Stiftung Berlin. Our coaches have relentlessly helped writing content, supporting the building of the USB-Stick and hosting event. Heck, we love it so much, we took it to Zurich and started it there, too. So it makes us very proud to announce that OpenTechSchool will officially take over the hosting and organization of IT-Labs in Berlin from Technology Stiftung Berlin and start it with an official, public kick-off ceremony on February 20th at ImmobilienScout (feel free to join here).
The kick-off event
Will take place February 20th, 15h30 at ImmobilienScout24:
ImmobilienScout24Andreasstraße 10
10243 Berlin
You can find the full schedule here. The event will be german-only. To sign up, please use this form.
What is IT-Labs
When it comes to Tech-Education in Schools many teachers are lost: even if they knew what to teach, few schools have the facilities and coaches to give their pupils access to this. And even if they do, they are often bound to restrictive and boring tech curricula. The idea behind IT-Labs is to break this loop by getting the kids out of their class rooms and schools and into fun and exciting tech environments, where they learn hands-on coding and tech topics. For that IT-Labs Berlin was able to build a network of Partners, namely OpenTechSchool, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Technische Universität Berlin, the Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Technik, KDAB Deutschland and ImmobilienScout24, building, hosting and running these workshops.
The Future of IT-Labs
The idea is to start with at least one IT-Labs workshop morning per month and increase this over time. Which workshops are offered and when depends on the availability of coaches. To make booking easier, the date, place and topic will be pre-announced and promoted to all schools in the network, which then can decide to apply with their class/group of pupils. The experience of the last year taught us that a longer time-frame between announcement and event is of a lot of help. Once this has been set in motion, we’d like to increase the frequency, but first things first.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://blog.opentechschool.org/2014/02/taking-over-it-labs-berlin.html