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Results of young European creativity camp for Europes schools in the future
At the first European Innovation & Creativity Camp, which took place in Brussels on 24-25 November, around 100 secondary school students from 25 countries were given the task to come up - within only 24 hours - with a visionary product, service or innovation for the school of the future. A 'Tech-Box' teaching aid, better schooling through social networks and specialised programmes for people who have dropped out of education were just some of the innovations that emerged from this special contest.
The camp was one of the flagship projects of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009, organised by the European Commission and Junior Achievement-Young Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe.

Participants of the contest – all between 14 and 18 years old - were divided into mixed-nationality teams, and had just 24 hours to suggest concrete solutions to a problem that has been challenging European governments for decades - how best to engage students and make education more relevant for the future. They quickly had to learn how to work together, as they brainstormed solutions and developed their ideas into business plans.

Tiina Karppinen, a student from Finland explained what she learnt at this special event; "It has been such a great challenge to work with new people from all sorts of different countries; we had to learn about each other's education systems and then decide what solution we were going to develop. I learnt a lot about teamwork and how to communicate my ideas clearly."


The winners: schooling through social networks

*The winning team developed the concept of 'FaceSchool' and 'YouSchool' based on the idea of engaging students in education via social networking sites. The group, made up of students from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Estonia, the UK and Norway presented their solution to a jury which included businesspeople, journalists and EU staff, who praised them for the creativity and feasibility of their idea to give students more incentives to stay in education.

The event was hosted by Maroš Šefčovič, Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, who joined the other eight member of the jury to choose the most innovative solution and award the winners. Commissioner Šefčovič, said: "This is the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, so in judging the young, international teams for this marathon competition, we were especially keen to see innovative and creative solutions." He added that "more attention needs to be paid to developing critical thinking and innovation at all levels of the education system, and programmes like this European Innovation and Creativity Camp are a great way to get students engaged in creative thinking and reasoning."

The purpose of the special European Innovation & Creativity Camp was to help young people develop the skills they need to be successful employees or entrepreneurs in the future. "We are pleased to see that European Commission put innovation and creativity in the spotlight by choosing it as the theme for the year," said Caroline Jenner, the CEO for JA-YE Europe.

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