Radio România Internațional

Tag: pupils

  • Solve for Tomorrow

    Solve for Tomorrow

    Attention-grabbing, as of late, has been Solve for Tomorrow, a competition
    focusing on involvement, determination, education responsibility, but also on the
    future high school students from across Romania, youngsters aged 16 to 18, try
    to build today, from one idea to the next. The competition has now reached its
    third edition, so it does have a tradition of its own, reason enough for us to speak
    with the representatives of the winning teams in 2022.


    Two high-school students with Bucharest’s Tudor Vianu National
    College, Cosmina Ene and Sânziana Grecu of the SurvEco team, 3rd placed
    at the end of the 3rd edition of the Solve for Tomorrow in 2022 told
    us the following.


    Cosmina Ene:

    We’re members of SurvEco, a team that came in 3rd
    as part of the 2nd edition of Solve for Tomorrow. Our project
    consisted in an autonomous drone using Artificial Intelligence, which overflies
    Bucharest and its outskirts, with the purpose of detecting illegal waste and
    its burning, because pollution in Bucharest is mainly caused by such illegal waste
    deposits.

    Sânziana Grecu:

    For us, the competition translated into a personal development
    process and opened up many paths for us, because we met people with whom we
    collaborated and to whom we wouldn’t have had access, normally.

    Cosmina Ene:

    We recommend all pupils who
    want to have fantastic experience ant who want to surpass themselves to
    participate in this year’s edition of the competition.


    The Solve for Tomorrow national competition organized by Samsung
    Electronics Romania in partnership with Junior Achievement Romania designated
    its winners based on the marks given by an interdisciplinary judging panel.


    Spacemind Kingdom, the team that came in 2nd , is made of
    three girls coordinated by a teacher with of the Jacques M. Elias Techological
    High School in Sascut, Aurelia Dascalu. Here is what one of the pupils, Andreea, told us.

    As part of the Solve for Tomorrow’s previous
    edition we won the 2nd prize with an educational application
    dedicated to women teenagers. We created a game by means of which they can
    develop their abilities and knowledge about the STEM system. Apart from this
    game, we also had a section enabling the girls to speak to personalities that
    had a strong bearing on these areas, through Artificial Intelligence. We started
    off from the idea that we need to encourage teenagers to encourage to work in
    this field despite the stereotypes that have been created. The competition
    helped us learn about design thinking, a concept that enabled us to develop the
    idea we started from, to a greater extent, we managed to discover ourselves, we
    developed new abilities, but, over and above anything else, we opened new
    horizons towards technology and towards what we really want to become.


    The 1st Prize went to The Green Team of the Eudoxiu
    Hurmuzachi National College in Rădăuți. The team developed the prototype of a
    hydroponic farming system that enables the cultivation of plants in a nutrients
    bed and an addition of vegetable oil that slow down water evaluation.

    Here is team leader Cosmin:


    Our purpose is that, in the future, we
    should practice farming according to hydroponic systems on an industrial scale.
    We still study the domain, one prototype after the next, but the way seems promising.
    We wouldn’t have reached this point had we not participated in the Solve for
    Tomorrow competition. As part of the competition, we met entrepreneurs of
    various walks of life who offered us their pieces of advice and guided us and we
    participated in design-thinking sessions. We recommend each and every youngster
    who has an idea to participate.


    Head of Communications Samsung Romania, Sabina Ştirb, told us the
    following:

    Solve for Tomorrow is a project Samsung
    Electronics Romania holds most dear, its third edition is launched today. It
    has collected more than 600 projects so far, from all over the country. Also,
    there is the global version of the Solve for Tomorrow, a project that took off
    13 years ago and in which 1.8 million pupils got involved, globally. Yet, apart
    from those figures, we mainly celebrate today are by all means pupils and
    teachers, mentors who work with the ideas that were registered for the
    competition.


    Here is what Junior Achievement Romania Educational director, Loredana Poenaru,
    told us:


    It is a project
    that dares pupils to put together their technology, education and creativity,
    so that they can develop solutions for the problems in communities, be they environment-related
    issues or educational circumstances that can be improved., education-wise, as regards
    long-lasting development, all these are domains children can consider if they
    want to develop their ideas. We’re now in the third edition. So far, we’ve had
    600 ideas that were registered in the previous editions, for each edition the
    second stage means selecting 25 of the best ideas that have been going through
    a development process, with design thinking underlying it, at once enabling
    youngsters to develop their ideas up to the stage of prototype, and further inviting
    them to consider the possibility of implementing those ideas. Apart from design thinking they get in touch with entrepreneurs,
    they can also learn how to give their ideas an entrepreneurial direction, they
    go through mentoring sessions and that is how things thus reach a feasible
    stage. At the end of the competition youngsters are attached to the projects they
    have been working on for so many months, so in the ensuing phases they should develop
    the need to take their projects further, to the implementation stage.


    The third edition of Solve for Tomorrow has kicked off already!

  • The Bucharest Bookshops Center and its recent projects

    The Bucharest Bookshops Center and its recent projects



    Super stories from Bucharest is the title of an anthology that has been launched recently. It is the first book written by children and adolescents of Bucharest. It brings together stories that re-enliven the legends and the tales from the history of the city. The collection includes stories authored by the winners of the contest also dubbed Super stories from Bucharest. The contest was launched in early 2021.



    With the support of Bucharest Municipality and ARCUB, Romania’s longest-lasting chain of bookshops, the Bucharest Bookshops Company, printed a few thousand copies of the anthology titled Super stories from Bucharest. The book is given out for free in all 40 bookshops as part of the Bucharest Bookshops Company. The initiators of Super stories from Bucharest are the Bucharest Bookshops Company jointly with Headsome Communication. The initiator and the coordinator of the project, Oana Boca Stănescu, is the president of Headsome Communication.



    Oana Boca Stanescu:



    This book was born as part of an event staged by the Bucharest Bookshops Company. As far as I’m concerned, I have been and still am inspired by the activities staged by the Bucharest Bookshops Company, an outlet that has been on the book market for more than 71 years now, I am impressed by their success, the Bucharest Bookshops Company has succeeded to stay close to all book lovers from around the capital city. In 2020, the Bucharest Bookshops Company was getting ready to celebrate 70 years since their foundation and, since we have been jointly carrying cultural projects for quite some time now, we were planning a rather ambitious schedule. However, the pandemic broke out and all the planned events were no longer possible, but still, we succeeded to carry some of the events through. One such event was an initiative to plant trees in Bucharest, as a sign of the fact that the Bucharest Bookshops Company has been close to the readers in the capital city for almost three generations and the company holds dear the future generation as well. The event I’m speaking about was staged in the Youth Park, there we organized that action of planting trees. And that’s how I got to hear stories about the Vale of Tears, about a submerged church, about the Cocioc Lake in the Youth Park, while me and other people younger than myself realized we didn’t know much about those places. And we realized that, perhaps, the younger generations are not very familiar with the stories and legends of Bucharest either. And that’s how we thought to initiate this project, by means of which we sought to re-enliven the legends and the stories of Bucharest. And, without the support and the enthusiasm of the Bucharest Bookshops Company, as the project running as Super stories from Bucharest is Bucharest Bookshops Brand, we would not have been able to carry it through, to materialize it. Fortunately, for quite a few years now we have been witnessing a revival of the literature for children, we’ve got quite a few living authors who write literature for children. I think it is the most marvelous thing that can happen on a book market, which is rather poor, as if you want to train new generations of readers, you need to draw them to reading in due time



    Marieta Seba, the general manager of the Bucharest Bookshops Company, tells us how the project came into being.



    This project, just as Oana Boca Stănescu said, was born as part of the tree-planting event we organized, jointly with the Bucharest Bookshops Company. In 2020 we had set for ourselves the task of celebrating the Bucharest Bookshops Company’s 70 anniversary in a rather festive way, staging a couple of events and being more public and communication-centered. Because of the pandemic, it was no longer possible for us to implement our ideas, so our collaborators came up with this idea, that of planting trees in the Youth Park. It was an event that also drew children, who turned up in large numbers. We saw children were brimming with joy as they were taking part in the event, so we thought of marking the Bucharest Bookshops Company’s 70th anniversary staging more than one event for that. So, we also thought of getting a booklet brought out. And we do hope for all that to be just the beginning of a project, to be run along many years from now and to develop into a wider-scope project, capable of getting as many schoolchildren as possible involved. In everything we have achieved so far it was about a lot of passion, a lot of heart we put into it, as that is also our slogan. Out of love for the book. For us, those with the Bucharest Bookshops Company, the financial aspect has never been a priority, every time we tried to do interesting and creative things, capable of representing us, even though there wasn’t enough funding for that.



    Ioana-Alexandra Anastasiu, a pupil of Middle School number 280 in Bucharest, is one of the winners of the contest launched as Super Stories from Bucharest. Her story about the Capsa House has been included in the anthology that has recently been launched by the the Bucharest Bookshops Company with a similar title, Super Stories from Bucharest.



    Ioana-Alexandra Anastasiu:



    I registered, jointly with my Religion teacher, for an optional course themed Travelers through Bucharest. And during each class we were discussing the legends and the history of the buildings of Bucharest, so much so that, as soon as I’ve learned about this contest, Super Stories from Bucharest, I made my mind up to participate straight away, as I am passionate about the Romanian Language and History and I saw that as a fine opportunity for me to express my passions. I opted for writing about the Capsa House as it is one of Bucharest’s most elegant and most sumptuous buildings, it is a building that, in time, was visited by many personalities, especially at the time of La Belle Epoque. I have always admired this building and I really got my kicks out of being given the opportunity to write about it.



    The project was successful and managed to arouse the interest of children and adolescents, so the organizers sought to strengthen the initiative and, in early 2022, they initiated the second edition of the story-writing contest.


    (EN)