Translator: Roberto Minelli Reviewer: Michele Gianella
Wow! It’s an honor for me to be here today,
and it seems so weird to be on this red carpet
if I consider how, up to ten years ago, my life revolved around sailing.
I would spend all my free time at sea –
not only on those glorious hot days, typical of the Sicilian summer,
but also on cold wintry ones.
I remember, as if it were yesterday,
my totally frozen hands and feet
at the end of my winter training sessions.
And I have to admit I was so focused on sailing
that I hadn’t even noticed the advent of the Internet.
One of the first times I encountered the Internet
dates back to when I was preparing my high-school final project.
I remember I didn’t even know how to search for photos
and, eventually, I ended up photocopying pictures
from books I had borrowed from the library
and gluing them onto my paper
since I didn’t even know how to find photos
and insert them into a computer-written text.
In ten years,
my life has been completely turned around by the digital revolution.
The Internet was my bridge, from Sicily to the rest of the world.
But what really opened my eyes on the digital revolution
was to come a few years later, when I found out about 3D printing.
And I found out about it by watching a TED Talk
by Anthony Atala.
Professor Atala talked about 3D-printing of human organs
and the promise of saving hundreds of thousands of people’s lives
thanks to this technology.
A fantastic thing
and, for me, pure science-fiction at the time.
I was so intrigued
that I decided to see a 3D printer with my own eyes
and I was lucky enough to find a 3D-printing course in Brussels,
the city where I lived back then.
The course description reassured me
because it stated that anyone,
even someone like me who had studied economics,
could learn how to 3D print within a matter of hours.
So, I went for it.
And I did right, because, in just a few hours,
that course enabled me to create a 3D-printed key-chain
with my name on it.
It wasn’t organ printing, just plastic printing;
but that simple key-chain
made me see the technology under a different light,
as a creative tool
instead of something to be used passively.
And that was for me the beginning of a path
that would lead me a couple of years later,
to found both a specialized 3D-printing start-up for dentists
and the ‘Teens4Kids’ project,
which I would like to tell you about today.
I’ve been working on this project for three years
with an outstanding team of volunteers
who, just like me, were willing to invest in the future of Sicily
and bring to Sicily
what they had discovered while abroad.
Together, we are creating a bridge
that enables Sicilian students
to get in touch with innovations from every corner of the world.
And we aim to show, and promote,
our idea that technology is an active creative tool.
We came up with this project
when we directly experienced the width of the gap
between innovative realities – like Silicon Valley –
and other realities – like Sicily –
where people are subjected to rather than creators of technology.
The reason behind this divide is, first of all,
the fact that today there are not that many digital creators.
For example, online communities talk about the so-called 1%-rule:
that is, only 1% of the users in a community
are content creators,
while the rest are contributors
and, above all, passive consumers of contents created by someone else.
We live in a world where few people create contents and services
that are consumed by millions or billions of people.
And the most worrying thing
is that not only are there few digital technology creators,
but these few creators
are concentrated in some countries and in big cities.
In my opinion, this concentration of creators –
and, in general, the divide
between technology creators and passive consumers of technology –
is one of the biggest problems of the 21st century
and may end up creating considerable
economic, political, and social inequalities.
I believe that this issue should be tackled urgently,
and we need to start working on it today.
In this transition to the digital world,
native digitals are particularly vulnerable.
And we need to reconsider what we normally believe –
that they were born in a digital era,
so they are certainly more familiar with the digital world.
These kids were actually born
in a world where Internet is taken for granted
and isn’t often called into question.
If we consider our school-age teenagers,
we can see that most of them browse the Internet in a passive way
and are able to use social media and Instagram.
But how many of these students can use the Internet actively
to create contents, develop entrepreneurial ideas
or solve social problems?
Yet I’m not here to talk about how urgent it is, in my opinion,
to reform the educational system in Italy.
I believe we all agree
that our educational system
hasn’t adjusted to the digital revolution yet
and isn’t training creators who can make a difference in the digital era,
obviously with a few exceptions.
I’m here to talk about how firmly I believe
that every single one of us, in our own little way,
can contribute to solving this problem.
And we can start doing so from the bottom up, from our local area,
rather than waiting for someone at a higher level
to change the education system.
In our case, we started from Marsala – the town where I grew up –
on the westernmost tip of Sicily.
I imagine that some of you have heard of Marsala for our wine,
but most of you don’t know that Marsala is also known as ‘the windy city’,
with a lot of sailing enthusiasts, like me.
I believe that there are three key ingredients
to becoming great sailors,
the same ingredients
characterizing our ‘Teens4Kids’ project.
The first one is practice:
you can only learn how to sail by sailing and not from books.
You become good at sailing
by practicing under every condition:
when you fall, when you get back on board, when you fall again,
when you cry because you feel lost on the open sea,
when you win and when you lose.
And by spending long hours at sea.
The second ingredient is teamwork.
When you train with a team, you grow with your teammates.
When I sailed,
We used to take every training session as a small competition:
you learned from the oldest mates and taught the youngest.
With the right team, you can make it all together.
The third ingredient is the environment.
Marsala boasts the ideal conditions for sailing:
a lot of wind, a beautiful sea
one would never want to get off the boat
and a temperature that allows you to train all year long.
These three ingredients — practice, teamwork, and environment —
are the three key principles of the ‘Teens4Kids’ project.
Let’s start from the first one: practice.
If your daughter were to tell you that she wants to go in for sailing,
would you ever buy her a book?
I hope not: you learn how to sail on the water.
And the same
happens with technology, you learn it by experiencing it, using it,
and not from a book.
If we want our students to become creators,
they need a hands-on approach to technology,
learning how to use it in an active way.
It’s not important that they learn about a specific type of technology
because everything they learn today
will be obsolete a few years from now.
What really counts, instead,
is that they learn to see technology
as a creative tool.
Today we have the opportunity to convey this idea of technology
through digital fabrication tools
such as 3D printers and laser-cutting machines.
I guess that some of you have never seen a 3D printer.
And I imagine you think they are expensive and difficult to use.
Actually, this is far from true.
In the last few years, digital fabrication
has become both financially and technically accessible.
Any school
could afford to buy some of these machines
and create a small lab.
Today, for example,
we can buy 3D printers for less than € 100.
And the fact that they are technically accessible
is guaranteed by an economist who discovered the Internet 10 years ago.
In the ‘Teens4Kids’ project, we started with four basic modules:
programming – or coding –, electronics, 3D printing,
and laser cutting.
And our students learn through a hands-on approach, by doing
and, above all, by playing.
For example, during one of our workshops,
our students create a DIY microscope
by using laser-cutting machines.
For the electronic component,
they disassemble a webcam,
take its lens
and assemble it onto the structure they have previously cut
with the laser-cutter.
Then, they have fun
customizing their own microscope as they wish.
During this creative process,
not only do students learn 2D drawing, laser cutting,
and how to disassemble a webcam –
which is another essential skill in the digital era –,
but above all, they also learn to see technology
as a tool to discover the world around them.
With this workshop, I saw kids, even grown-ups,
run curious on the streets
picking up leaves, bugs and any weird things they came across.
I also saw somebody rub a cotton bud
in their mouth to look for bacteria, then spread them onto the microscope
and actually use this tool
to observe and satiate their curiosity.
Moreover, such projects
are precious tools if you wish to make science democratic.
These microscopes cost around € 10
and enable us to have images like this,
top-quality ones, just like those you can obtain from digital microscopes
that cost at least 10 times as much.
Once they have learned some basic skills,
students are free to use their own imagination,
creating whatever they consider useful or simply fun,
such as small Pokémon.
And technology becomes a tool
they can use to create something to be proud of;
it doesn’t matter what they create, the point is
they should create it with their own hands.
Imagine projects like this one
being carried out by students in all of our schools;
imagine how our education could change
if, for example, during a science class,
students could not only study bacteria from their books
but also learned how to create a microscope
to observe the bacteria they are studying.
In this way, technology wouldn’t only be a new school subject,
but it would become part and parcel of the school curriculum,
a real learning tool.
We could bring this type of creative digital education
to all of our schools
along with the two other main features of the ‘Teens4Kids’ project:
teamwork and a suitable learning environment.
We can’t expect all of our teachers
to turn into digital experts from one day to the next,
but we can facilitate this transition
by creating teams capable of leveraging teenagers’ curiosity.
In the ‘Teens4Kids’ project,
we are training students from high schools
to act as trainers for the younger ones.
This approach boasts a high number of advantages:
first of all, these students are digital natives –
they grew up with technology –
so they can easily teach it to the younger students.
Moreover, involving teenagers
enables us to bring digital education to schools
while cutting costs and saving time,
considerably increasing
the number of students we can reach.
This year, the ‘Teen For Kids’ project
we are carrying out in Marsala involves a group of 10 volunteers
training 100 high-school students
who, in turn,
will be training as many as 750 primary school pupils during this school year.
According to their interests, high-school students
are being asked to play different roles in our project:
some are teaching, others are helping us prepare lessons,
still others are busy translating materials, such as workshops,
from English into Italian;
and then, a group are helping us
run this project, as if it were their own start-up.
These high-school students are taking part in our project
as part of the 'alternanza scuola-lavoro,'
a work placement project preparing them not only to enter the world of work –
and for life in general –
whereby they will acquire a vision of technology
as a tool for training, developing social commitment and bringing about change.
Teaching is also the best way to learn,
and these students are becoming very young digital experts.
Some of them have decided
to continue with their studies in the scientific and technological areas –
so, they will be enrolling for university courses in these fields –,
inspired by our activities;
others have already created innovative start-ups in Marsala,
and one of these, developed by teenagers,
already boasts as many as 16,000 users worldwide.
Along with practice through digital fabrication
and a team leveraging teenagers’ skills,
there is a third essential factor in helping us to train new creators:
the environment.
While in sailing the environment is given and can’t be modified –
we can only be lucky enough
to be born and raised in a windy and sun-kissed place –,
in such projects as ‘Teens for Kids’ the environment
can be designed to suit one’s needs.
In our case,
to create an atmosphere conducive to creative learning
and train our students,
we are using free online resources,
including those made available by prestigious universities
such as the MIT and Stanford.
We have selected workshops, projects,
and courses that we are replicating in Sicily.
Thanks to these materials,
we are offering digital and creative education
that costs around 10 Euros per student:
creative education for the same price as a cinema ticket.
This is the power of the Internet:
making excellent education affordable and accessible to everybody,
in a democratic way.
I must admit that it wasn’t easy to find resources for this workshop,
because often they are not available in Italian
and scattered across many platforms in different languages,
so in the ‘Teens4Kids’ project
we aim to contribute to removing this barrier
so as to allow many others
to take part in creative education projects at school.
For this reason, we have decided to launch an online platform in Italian,
where to share the workshops, projects, and courses
we used for the courses we are now running
and for the ones we are hoping to run in future,
thus providing a good starting point
for those who aim to promote
digital education in their area.
However, if we want this platform – this ‘Teens4Kids’ portal –
to make a difference,
our contribution is not enough.
We will be launching this platform next January
and, meanwhile, we would like to invite all the people who, like us,
are working to train young creators
to contribute to its development.
Last night we launched
an online portal
created by some of our students,
on which we invite people willing to make their contribution
to share their projects, workshops, case histories, lessons learned,
in short anything they might want to share
through the ‘Teens4Kids’ portal.
This way, our portal can become a starting point,
as well as a meeting place where to exchange lessons learned
and encourage cooperation among those who want to make a difference
and bring this kind of education to schools.
By creating a network based on experimentation and sharing,
moving from a number of isolated cases
we could initiate an educational revolution from the bottom up.
Together, we can train a generation of creators
who are likely to play a key role in the digital era,
rather than be mere onlookers of this transformation.
We can all contribute to this mission:
teachers can take a workshop
from the ‘Teens4Kids’ portal and use it in their classes.
Both university students and teenagers
can knock on the door of a primary school
and offer to hold a workshop;
the next step is to take it to other schools and communities.
Sharing these workshops and lessons learned on our online portal
multiplies the impact of such initiatives.
Activist Bertha Calloway used to say that
‘we cannot direct the wind,
but we can adjust our sails’.
When you start sailing,
you normally allow yourself to be impelled by the wind
in the direction it is blowing.
After a while, you start taking control of the boat,
choosing the route and even sailing upwind.
The wind goes from being an obstacle
to being a means to reach a destination.
With practice by means of digital manufacturing,
a team leveraging teenagers and a suitable educational environment,
we can enable this generation of Italian students
to see the technology in the same way a sailor sees the wind:
as a means to reach their destination.
Thank you.
(Applause)