The 1st community building event in Greece for project ICT-INOV: Modernizing ICT Education for Harvesting Innovation took place in the context of the Electrical Engineering STudents’ European assoCiation – EESTec 2023 Challenge on March 18, 2023. EESTec Challenge is a yearly competition for European university students/graduates with the aim to gain knowledge in the field of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and expand their professional networks. The competition consists of several Local rounds organized by EESTEC branches in different European cities and the Final Round where the winners of the local rounds will compete with each other.
The event was organized in Thessaloniki at the Thessaloniki City Hall. The EESTec challenge was a good opportunity for community building as it enabled reaching wide student audiences, academics, and industry members from several universities or other stakeholders throughout Greece.
The ICT-INOV project objectives, activities, and outcomes were presented during the event in dedicated workshop. More specifically, the audience had the opportunity to be exposed to design thinking principles for introducing innovative solutions to challenging problems of the modern world. They were familiarized with the design thinking steps of problem discovery, empathy, user persona creation, problem defition, ideation, evaluation of ideas, and prototyping. In addition, the audience was exposed to the ICT-INOV digital learning platform and educational activities and had the opportunity to see the labs created by the project for supporting innovation skill building.