Bratislava is setting the scene for a new alliance with its universities in Slovakia. This newspaper article titles: “The Children Will Not Wait Project: Universities should work with other school levels”. Slovakia envisages in the forthcoming partnership agreement the connection of universities to science and employers, while the proposals completely omitted the emphasis on cooperation with other schools’ levels. He points out the project Children will not wait. However, experience from developed countries shows that university students benefit from meeting the needs of practice and contact with younger students and pupils. TASR was informed about this by project spokesman Anton Oberhauser.
The opportunity for such a connection is MyMachine. “The children dream of an idea, the university students process it into a feasible form, and the production takes place at a secondary vocational school,” Laura Dittel from the Carpathian Foundation, which has been administering the program for the fifth year, explained the essence. The Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Technical University in Košice, Jozef Živčák, noted that “a human and professional axis of cooperation has been created in the level from children’s thinking and dreaming to implementation to a real portfolio of high school and university students”.
The program originated in Belgium. “It draws attention to the need and benefits of linking non-formal and formal learning. During the first four years, we have implemented a total of 20 inventions at MyMachine, such as a levitating chair, a portable slide or a cleaning scooter.” said the project coordinator Žofia Teplická. In the current year, university students from the Technical University in Košice, the University of Žilina in Žilina, the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava and the Trnava University are working on 12 children’s ideas.
The partnership agreement’s final text is to set to signed upon in the first half of 2021.
Read the full article here: https://www.teraz.sk/
