Quarantine as a time to reflect and overcome everyday problems together. The students of Alma Mater Studiorum challenge each other in a hackaton to find innovative solutions capable of helping those with mild intellectual disabilities, in a period in which the health emergency made it necessary to close the day care centers.
#SocialMakersforCovid19 is the challenge that the University of Bologna, in collaboration with the Down Syndrome Parents Association, launches to all its students.
From 7 to 15 April, four teams of students will compete online to devise solutions and create high social impact projects designed to support families living with children with Down syndrome or other forms of mild intellectual disability, in a particularly difficult period in which they cannot count on the daily help of day centers for the disabled.
"It is a way to enhance skills, generate innovative ideas and bring our students closer to important social issues such as disability and support actions," says Professor Rosa Grimaldi, delegate for entrepreneurship at the University of Bologna. "All this, in a particularly delicate moment, when the weakest risk to become the most exposed and least protected: precisely for this reason it is necessary to act also with the help of new ideas and solutions".
The initiative, which will take place remotely via the Teams platform, will thus become a real training path. Through the "learning by helping" methodology, and with the support of a tutor, students will be able to face a real problem to find new operational solutions that can be of support for the families of children with mild intellectual disabilities.
Thanks to mediated access to the AlmaLabor makerspace, through laboratory technicians, prototypes of the solutions designed by the students themselves will also be made.
