The municipality of Tías, in Lanzarote, became the largest technology festival of Canary Islands educational centers last Friday, June 10, hosting its first RetoTech awards festival of the Endesa Foundation, an initiative that this year celebrates its seventh edition and with which, in collaboration with the education ministries of the participating autonomous communities and the support of BQ Educación, challenges teachers and students to develop initiatives in the classroom that include robotics, programming and 3D printing and solve real needs of their school or social environment.
In this face-to-face edition after two years of stoppage caused by the global pandemic caused by Covid 19, 211 educational centers from Madrid, Aragon, Andalusia, Extremadura, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and, as a novelty this year, the Canary Islands are participating. All of them have highlighted during the Fair held prior to the awards ceremony, the importance of developing initiatives in the classroom that include robotics, programming and 3D printing and solve real needs of school or social environments.
This year, 11 awards are given to the best initiatives presented, four at the national level that have gone to schools in Andalusia ("Endesa Foundation" and "Redes Award"), and 7 at the local level. "Teacher Award". In addition, the winning centers in each category will be awarded by BQ Educación with a bMarker digital educational solution training to apply programming and robotics in the classroom, which will be activated in the following school year 2022-2023.
At the RetoTech Festival held in the Canary Islands, the local "Teacher Award" (named because it is chosen during the event by the teachers participating in the contest) was won this year by IES Tías with a work on Sustainable Tourism. The 4th year ESO students triumphed with an innovative sustainable tourism project. It is aimed at tourists in vacation homes who will be able to monitor their water and electricity consumption with a measuring system.
The award ceremony was attended by the general director of the Endesa Foundation, Javier Blanco, the director of Institutional Relations and Technological Innovation of Endesa in the Canary Islands, José Manuel Valle, the head of the RetoTech project, Paloma Casas, accompanied by the insular director of Education, Celeste Callero, and the director of the CEP of Lanzarote, Flor Alonso.
In the words of Javier Blanco, general director of the Endesa Foundation, "Illuminating talent and promoting STEM vocations among young people is essential to create the new generations of the future, and with RetoTech students have the opportunity to develop their technological skills and competences by putting into practice what they learn in the classroom."
For his part, the director of Institutional Relations and Technological Innovation of Endesa in the Canary Islands, José Manuel Valle, explains that "the Canary Islands undoubtedly have a lot of talent and today's awards demonstrate it. From Endesa we are very satisfied and sure that in future editions even more educational centers will join." At another time, Valle highlights that "it has been possible to see the motivation of the students who can see the result of something made with their own hands. Also, to praise the enormous contribution of the teaching staff. The schoolchildren who participate in Retotech are an example of teamwork, effort and passion for research."
Also, during the month of June, the festivals of this VII edition of RetoTech will continue to be held in other participating Autonomous Communities; the election and delivery of local awards in Extremadura are still pending, on June 14, and in Madrid for the participating Madrid and Aragonese schools, in an event to be held on June 16.
For their part, in the Canary Islands the centers that participated in this edition and that have met in Lanzarote are: IES Tías, IES Las Maretas, IES Agustín Espinosa, IES Blas Cabrera Felipe and IES En Altavista, all of them located on the island of Lanzarote, for Fuerteventura the IES Puerto del Rosario competes, while the IES Ramón Menéndez Pidal, for Gran Canaria and the IES El Médano, Escuelas Pías and Pureza de María school, have worked on their technological projects from the island of Tenerife.
Winning projects of the national awards "Endesa Foundation Awards" and "Redes Award"
The primary school students of CEIP San Jorge de Palos de la Frontera have received the first national prize of the RetoTech contest for the originality and creativity of their Perfect Care project, a control and care system for newborns through a system of light and sound sensors whose use has been extended to families with hearing or visual disabilities. This solution devised by the students of this school in Huelva consists of a system that allows to adjust the temperature of baby food, cradle them and calm them through music.
The national award in recognition of the best project applicable to a real need has been taken by the primary school students of CEIP Nuestra Señora de Loreto of the Cordovan town of Dos Torres with their Communicator project, designed to help two students in the specific classroom of this school to communicate. The device created and designed by the students of this center has a luminous and binary sound device that helps to communicate in a simple way to these students.
The third national prize has been awarded to the IES Almicerán of the town of Peal de Becerro in Jaén. The secondary school students of this educational center have won the recognition for the best project for its aesthetic and artistic dimension thanks to their BlindTechHelp work. It is a prototype of a cane with sensors, line followers and sound warnings that indicate to a student of the center who lost her sight at the age of 5 how to guide herself through the school.
The national REDES award, chosen through social networks and which recognizes the originality of the proposals, has also gone to Andalusia. This is the case of the MRU project of the CEIP Híspalis of Seville. The primary school students of this educational center have presented in a very original way a device that helps to recycle waste.
RetoTech Awards
The RetoTech awards are a novel training initiative, which aims to contribute and promote innovative educational projects that transform the training of the youngest. To this end, the Endesa Foundation proposes a challenge aimed at teaching staff and students of the Autonomous Communities of Madrid, Aragon, Andalusia, Extremadura, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands: to develop a technological project that solves a real need of their environment, using techniques such as Arduino robotics.
In this seventh edition, 380 centers from all over Spain have registered, of which 211 were selected. Since the launch of RetoTech in 2016, nearly 45,000 students and more than 3,000 teachers have benefited from this initiative, improving their technological skills.
The contest takes place throughout the school year in three stages. On the one hand, the training in educational innovations that the teachers in charge receive from the RetoTech team. Secondly, the work in the classroom on the challenges posed, which directly involves the students and in which the project takes shape. Finally, the preparation of the final project.
In addition. In each edition, so that they can start working on their projects, at the beginning of the school year the participating schools receive kits with technological material and the teachers receive blended training, focused on each of the three blocks of the program: robotics, programming of mobile applications and 3D design and printing.
