VEFRESH facilitates the development of competitive STEM education in the district and fosters cooperation between companies and education institutions.
Recent year polls show that only 2.1% of girls and 12.7% of boys in Latvia plan to link their professional lives to IT sector. At the same time, policy think tank Certus predicts that to satisfy the growing market needs, there should be around 3000 new IT graduates every year. However, the current amount of IT programme graduates stands at about 700 per year.
VEFRESH together with IT education foundation and other partners is actively engaged in several activities to generate interest in IT related career options. VEFRESH movement aims to develop VEF neighbourhood not only as an innovation district for tech solutions, but also for various education and public engagement initiatives.
City sustainability monitoring for smart solution facilitation ↓
City sustainability monitoring for smart solution facilitation
VEFRESH in cooperation with the Riga City Council and the municipality department of Alesunda “United Future Lab Norway“, develops a common methodology to measure progress in the deployment of sustanable development goals (SDGs) and to compare urban progress on a global scale.
The project is financed from the 2014-2021 period under the Financial Instrument for the European Economic Area and the Norwegian Financial Instrument for Bilateral Cooperation Fund.
Total amount of funding EUR 49 995. Project implementation time - May 2022.
Design & Technologies
Together with LMT and IT Education foundation, VEFRESH helps to develop supplementary materials for teachers who are interested to teach a new subject Design & Technologies for high school students. The aim of the project is to support them in the preparation of up-to-date teaching material that corresponds to the current best practices in the industry.
The supplementary materials are developed together with design experts Jelena Solovjova, Irina Ganevica, Liene Jakobsone, Dina Suhanova and Indra Komarova, and will cover design thinking, product design, environment and interior design as well as fashion design. The teachers will also have a chance to participate in special seminars during August 2020 to strengthen their knowledge and learn how to best use the materials during classes.
Kodē vai arī nē
Together with VEF district technology companies VEFRESH has develop a new pilot project - IT workshop cycle Kodē vai arī nē for high school students. The online project took place in the autumn of 2020.
Kodē vai arī nē, which translated to English means ‘Code or don’t’, programme consists of 5 workshops each devoted to a different IT profession. The aim of the project is to show that not all IT specialists are software developers; moreover, that designers, project managers, creatives, linguistics specialists and others can also build successful careers in tech. The course will include practical workshops at school’s computer class and also IT specialist own experience stories of starting career in tech.
The workshops will be lead by LMT, digital agency Bright, Accenture, Start(IT), Tieto Latvia (TietoEVRY group) and start up WinGo Deposit. During the workshops the students took part in design thinking workshops, created websites and also learned about the fundamentals of artificial intelligence.
Computer science teacher training
VEFRESH supports various IT Education foundation activities for Computer science teachers and in 2019 hosted Computer science teacher conference. Throughout the whole year VEFRESH partners have hosted programming workshops for high school Computer science teachers.
Computer science teacher conference took place in VEF district and gathered more than 400 informatics, computer science and programming teachers as well as other interested school representatives from across the country. It also was the launch of programming workshops for computer science teachers, created to support those who are ready to teach a more advanced curricula that matches the current industry standards.
Throughout the year the workshops were held in VEFRESH partner LMT and Accenture premises, co-working space Teikums and in VEF Culture palace. During the workshops the the teachers were introduced to version control tools and methods, but the main emphasis was on the learning process organization to make it easier for teachers to conduct programming lessons.