To put our second week in a nutshell is a challenge itself because, to us, it felt like
magic
happened.
We had been working in all this concepts around what makes a physical space and setting attractive to students in Uganda, what are the characteristics that we can expect from successful co-working and co-creation platforms, etc.
We were still trying to figure out all this when we just decided to
- ask permission to use the space
- clean it
- just do it!
The PBL students and ourselves organized workshops around the topics they had chosen (because it was relevant for their school projects). Those topics where: business plans, craddle to craddle, facilitation skills and human centered design.
During 2 days, students from Makerere University and Aalto organized workshops and more than 40 participants came.
The idea behind the workshops was to give the students the sense of ownership that they stated they were lacking sometimes within the current educational system. For most of them, it was the first time that they were being "the experts" on something and teaching others about it It was beautiful to be part of all this commitment and effort and work closely to these students that were sharing and learning so much in such a short period of time.
After 5 workshops were held, othe groups of students got more interested in the center (MAK EIC), and soon several smaller group of friends showed their interest in continuing working in the center.
The connection to relevant groups at the university and the introductino of the workshops set the stage for our work in the 3rd week: setting up the physical space through participatory intervention!