Empowered to empower: a Tool Fair Talk… and more

The European tool fair was created 12 years ago already by Salto Youth Euromed and Good Practices resource centre, as a chance for exchanging Learning Tools and practices and reflecting together on the potential of non formal education. It generated a lot of documents, publications, materials, tools and reflections, later collected in the Educational Tools Portal, which is now the reference point of the Tool Fair itself.

I was selected by Italian Erasmus+ National agency in 2014 to take part in edition n. 9 in Cluj, Romania, where I presented a learning activity based on coding your own video games using the MIT Scratch platform. After that experience, in the evaluation I proposed the organizers to trasform the next upcoming edition n. 10 (X) in a TedX event, including external speakers, different venues etc.

In 2016, I was asked to facilitate the Italian edition and I agreed with the team to introduce Ted-like talks in our Tool Fair, calling them TF Talks. TF Talks stayed in the Italian Tool Fair program since then, and I was even invited to give one in this last edition.

This very year, TF Talks finally made it even in the European edition, and I had the great honor to give a speech there. Edition n.13 was in Split, Croatia, in a fantastic venue on the sea. The city of Split was a marvelous surprise, with the Imperial Palace of emperor Diocletianus turned into the old city of Split.

Altough I was first invited there to only give a 15 mins speech, later on I was also asked to facilitate the first-ever hackathon held in such a context, supporting my hacker friend Aiko aka Alicja Jablonska, who brought in a real on-the-field hacking experience, to be applied to non formal education with my help.

Results were really impressive, as always happens when you involve users of some service (in this case, Tool Fair itself) to improve and innovate what they are using. Participants in this 6-hours, 3-sessions mini hackathon pointed out 44 elements needing possible innovation and designed 5 complete solutions for 5 of them.

To end it in glory, an unlucky participant did not get his visa in time and so he could not present his tool… therefore I was also asked to fill the slot presenting the good old Brian The Onion from Dig-It Up! I really was the everywhere man in Tool Fair XIII 😀

Here is my video anyway – the comments are open!