Our journey on creativity through project “Thinking outside of the box” has come to an end. During the two years we met to clarify creativity, to figure out how to find and mentor the talents, exchanged good creative teaching practices, used the help of the arts and examined intergenerational creativity. On our last meeting we aimed to map the connection of creativity and business by visiting innovative initiatives and companies in Budapest. We checked out “The Grund” and “Demola Budapest”, visited the Art Faculty of Budapest College of Communication and Business, also learned about the startup programme of the College and heard talks about the future of teaching from Balazs Koren and Dr Zsolt Lavicza.
If you ever heard of Ferenc Molnár’s book “The Paul street boys”, our first visit at The Grund would ring a bell for you – because this facility is located as in the book. This entrepreneurship has many functions from entertainment through support education and giving space such projects like Google’s stratup & training centre, Google Ground. They provide programmes for the kids and schools to visit when they reach the novel in their curriculum, thus they not just learn from the books but get their own experiences.
We continued our journey and visited another interesting initiative called Demola Budapest. This goal of this international network is to gather students together from different higher education institutions and fields in order to solve problems which companies gives to Demola instructors. The groups of students can choose which problem they would like to work on, make demos for the solution and present their idea to the company. If the company finds the solution useful, they can buy and implement it. Through this possibility students have a chance to use their knowledge in practice and connect to the labour world before ending their studies. You can watch the video here.
After a great lunch at a school-look artist place called Iskola we checked the Art Programs of Budapest College of Communication and Business (BKF), where Ferenc Koleszár guided us through graphic design, ceramics, clothes and jewellery designs and interior designs. As it was the final week for the students to get their projects done, it was fascinating to see the entire sparkling atmosphere of creativity.
We have not only visited the art faculty of BKF, but the main campus as well, where Dr. Ferenc Kiss Academic Vice-Rector of BKF told us about the possibilities of the students including the freshly started Startup programme of the College, where BKF donates the best entrepreneurship ideas, also the good results alumni students have already achieved on startup competitions.
Balázs Koren, lecturer at ELTE, co-founder of Hungarian Android Portal showed us new ways in the way of thinking when it comes to teaching; embrace technology over than closing it out. Currently smartphones and tablets are forbidden from most of the classes – but they can be used smartly to make the learning process more attractive for students.
Balázs’s tip: Try to involve some apps links to some of the classes. He personally used to be a math teacher in primary school. He asked the kids to bring their smartphones/tablets to class if they have so, than paired them up to make sure everyone has a device. On that class all the problems were given in QR codes. They had to finish one task before decoding the next, which led to more solved math tasks than at a regular class. This trick can not only used for math classes, also other apps available to twist the class up.
Dr. Zsolt Lavicza, professor of Cambridge University, Head of Researches in project GEOMATECH introduced us a specific application called GeoGebra which specialised to support the teaching of math and science. Zsolt is one of the founders of GeoGebra, and been around the globe make it available, thus make STEM* subjects easier to understand and fun to students. He also introduced GEOMATECH to us, which is an EU-funded project with the aim of implementing teaching with GeoGebra into the Hungarian national curriculum in order to make students understand STEM* more interactive from age 8 to 18, also hopefully break the ice for other innovative teaching applications and methods.
During our stay in Budapest we also participated in a challenge for our own logical creativity by a self-freeing mindgame by Mindquest, where you really need to think out of the box to get all the clues and free yourself and your group, also tried out Europe’s first amphibious tourbus, Riverride.
It has been a great meeting, and wonderful two years of exploring different aspects of creativity, and also the value of each other. It was not only a project, but through the joint work friendships been developed or became stronger. Thank you all who participated and made this happen, and thanks for all the people who stayed with us online. Keep the spirit up, keep “thinking outside of the box”!
* Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Thinking outside of the box 