Founded in 2016 with the aim of innovating educational curricula that meet the needs of society and the evolving job market, Paidea was named SME/Start-up Trainer of the Year at the recent EIT Education and Skills Day event.
“As technology grows rapidly, it creates new job and environmental challenges, so it’s important to improve education to help people develop digital and business skills.”
Guided by its three objectives; innovation, education, and planning, Paidea researches, designs, and implements training activities and projects that use technology and new teaching methods. The activities and projects focus on coding, educational robotics, programming, AI and STEM subjects. Paidea also pays special attention to encouraging young people to choose STEM careers, since these are the skills that are in demand to face today’s environmental challenges.
Paidea collaborates with associations, companies and institutions which centre on technology, innovation, and research and development across different sectors. Additionally, Paidea carries out vocational training and continuing professional education, and supports companies in the digitalisation process, resource optimisation, development of customisable and modular management software and platforms.
“Students are generally more intrigued and curious when learning through different teaching approaches.”
As Paidea applied its teacher-centred learning approach, it realised practical methods were key to success. Results showed that through playing games or doing interactive activities, students assimilate the knowledge whilst also having fun.
According to business leaders, creativity is the most-wanted skill in the ‘working world’, which will help future generations adapt and thrive in any future, especially one that will have jobs that don’t exist yet. However, to nurture a generation that’s ready to take on any challenge, Paidea know the importance of giving people the right environments to give their creative muscles a work-out starts with taking a look at what makes play such a powerful tool for learning, and making sure students get the opportunity to use it.
“Supporting creativity through play helps nurture people’s capacity to authentically contribute to their communities and positively shape their present and future world.”
Paidea have worked on several projects supporting this theory, which led to the development of a tool that enables trainers, teachers and educators to innovate their teaching practices by integrating gamification, technology and, more specifically, augmented reality. The GAD game is a platform where it is possible to create lessons and quizzes that use augmented reality to provide an immersive and engaging educational experience.
To boost participants’ STEM skills and give guidance on university study options, Paidea runs interactive hackathons, a hands-on training program in robotics and microelectronics. The main goal of which is to tackle a specific challenge or solve a complex problem by quickly creating working prototypes, software applications, or innovative solutions. With support from internal mentors, participants form teams and work intensively on their ideas, using skills in programming, sustainability, and urban planning.
Focusing on micro-electronics, Paidea have run this hackathon at several universities across Europe, successfully combining two events: one for generating innovative ideas and one for programming autonomous vehicles. Working in teams, Paidea provided participants with the “smart object kit” to turn their ideas into working prototypes, contributing to the development of advanced technological solutions for future cities. An additional challenge tested their skills: ensuring the proper functioning of an air quality monitoring sensor.
“As we look to our future, our aim is to increase the number of women and young people trained in deep tech.”
Paidea deeply believe in the importance of increasing the number of women and young people trained in deep tech and STEM, and are constantly trying to implement them in its team, as they can only bring a fundamental added value to the company.
In the next few years, STEM, AI and robotics are going to occupy an ever-increasing number of fields, dominating the future. For this reason, STEM has to join entrepreneurship and internationalisation, to reach as many people as possible all around the world, and Paidea hope to be the corporation able to do it.
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