Critical Making Mentoring Program 2022 in Review

Critical Making Mentoring Program 2022 in Review

By Melanie Chan Comment Closed
As part of the H2020-funded Critical Making project, we embarked on a series of initiatives that resulted in various interactive tools and literature tailor-made for academia, practitioners, and educators. A true gem among these initiatives was the Critical Making Mentoring Programme, a remarkable 9-month journey where makers received invaluable guidance from a group of esteemed mentors. They include Saad Chinoy, Co-Founder of SpudnikLab; Georgia Nicolau, Founder of Instituto Procomum; Bahar Kumar, Strategic Advisor at Communitere; Emilio Velis, Executive Director of Appropedia Foundation, and Aravinth Panch, Co-Director of DreamSpace Academy. We're thrilled to bring you the exciting highlights of the mentoring program and our talented mentees' inspiring experiences. Together, they explored the fundamental principles of the critical making framework in open science hardware, social innovation, and environmental sustainability. Our program welcomed 13 ambitious mentees from around the globe, including Brazil, Ecuador, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Iraq, and beyond! It was a meaningful co-learning experience where mentees gathered online to share their visions of addressing specific...
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Watch the Stream! GIG 10th anniversary

Watch the Stream! GIG 10th anniversary

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Check the online transmission! GIG supports the work of its 155 members in 47 countries. GIG facilitates global exchange between innovators and innovation spaces, and implements various projects. As the world becomes more complex and fast-paced, so do the challenges, threatening the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. Therefore, GIG enables cross-cultural connections and global knowledge exchanges, in order to support our members and their communities to develop solutions that best suit their local needs. We co-create and implement long-term projects that offer collaborative solutions to systemic problems in different localities.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgx5azRaagE ...
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Filling the gaps in Iraq

Filling the gaps in Iraq

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
We sat down to talk with Nawres Arif this past Thursday to discuss his maker program in Iraq. Nawres is a trained pharmacist but considers himself to be more than that. He is also an artist, designer, and robot maker. In around 2003, Nawres became a part of the global maker movement. His passion for making things and his hope to share his passion with others led him to found ScienceCamp in 2013. ScienceCamp became the first-ever maker space in Iraq. Nawres says that among many other goals, this maker space's main aim is to develop ways to “use science to make life better.”  Listen to the interview: Nawres told us that the traditional education model in Iraq does not allow students to explore their passions. Learning tends to be more theoretical than hands-on, “education needs to be more practical, interactive, and fun.” He found a solution to this problem in the maker movement. He tells us that the maker movement mixes...
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Noni Hub: Equipping Youths to Prototype for Local Needs

Noni Hub: Equipping Youths to Prototype for Local Needs

By Melanie Chan Comment Closed
Equipping young people with technological and entrepreneurial skills to solve local community problems is the mandate of one particular makerspace in the Northern region of Ghana.  Noni Hub, located in Wa, is a budding innovation that aims to foster innovation, creativity, and making scalable technological solutions. Mustapha Dauda, an African Maker and Engineer in electronics and robotics, leads the maker space's activities. Welcoming individuals enthusiastic about bringing their ideas to life, the activities of the makerspace include a three-week training program encompassing sessions on design, ideation, prototyping, and constructing. Participants are taught the design thinking process to develop functional solutions and trained on relevant maker techniques such as 3D modelling and woodwork to prototype their solutions. Check the Interview with Mustapha Dauda below: For Mustapha, seeing people embrace the maker movement and bring new ideas is exciting. Recounting an experience where one participant in the program wanted to set up a bee farm but could not afford to buy a beehive, he...
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FabLab Nepal: Empowering Communities Through Technological Access

FabLab Nepal: Empowering Communities Through Technological Access

By Melanie Chan Comment Closed
Technology has become an integral part of our lives in today's fast-paced world. Technology has transformed how we live and work, from smartphones to smart homes. However, not everyone has access to the latest technology or the skills to use it effectively. This is where organizations like FabLab Nepal come in. FabLab Nepal is a community-based digital fabrication laboratory that provides access to the latest technologies, such as 3D printing, laser cutting, and CNC milling, to people from all walks of life. Their mission is to empower communities through technology by providing access to tools and resources to help them bring their ideas to life. In the following interview with Pradita Pradhan, the co-founder of FabLab Nepal, she shared her thoughts on the importance of technology access and critical technological education in today's world and how FabLab Nepal is helping communities in Nepal. "We believe that technology is a great equalizer, and everyone should have access to it," said Pradita. "We aim to...
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Data_labe: A Hub for Data and Narratives from the Favela

Data_labe: A Hub for Data and Narratives from the Favela

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Data_labe is a data and narratives laboratory based in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is also a member of the Global Innovation Gathering (GIG), a network of innovation hubs, makerspaces, hackerspaces and other grassroots initiatives worldwide. In this blog post, we will showcase their work and connection to GIG and invite you to listen to an audio interview with Gilberto Vieira, one of the co-founders of data_labe. You can listen to the interview here: Data_labe was born in 2016 as a project within the Observatório de Favelas, a social organisation promoting favelas' human rights and social justice. In 2018, it became an autonomous non-profit association. Its mission is to promote the democratisation of knowledge through data generation, analysis and dissemination, focusing on race, gender and territory. Its team comprises young people from low-income regions who produce new narratives through data. At the core of their projects is the question of the images constructed about the city and its...
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Fostering Egypt’s development through The Make and Innovation perspective

Fostering Egypt’s development through The Make and Innovation perspective

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
San3a Tech is a social enterprise established by young Egyptians to democratize technical innovation and build an impactful community of makers. It is also one of the Global Innovation Gathering hub members since 2022. Egypt faces a critical problem of missing the importance of research and development in the community and its effect on the industry and the Egyptian economy. Therefore, there needs to be an environment to bring together people interested in making, innovation and technology. The main challenges faced by Egypt today include the following: Lack of hands-on learning techniques in schools and universities in Egypt, although Education and training are crucial to national's industry development, economic growth and political stability. The Egyptian vocational schools need to provide the industry with qualified and skilled technicians. Craftsmanship produces low-quality creations due to different reasons. Co-innovating in MENA region These were the main drivers for San3a Tech founders to start the grass-root initiative in March 2012 through Fab Lab Egypt at first, followed by several projects and...
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Gertrude Mawuena Goh – Inspirational stories about gender-inclusive making

Gertrude Mawuena Goh – Inspirational stories about gender-inclusive making

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Gertrude Mawuena GohAfrican Makerspace Network, Ghana Gertrude is currently working as an Executive Manager on the Africa Makerspace Network, a community of African Makerspaces. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Ghana. “The more such stories spread, the more other women would view it as normal and develop an interest to join.” Gertrude’s first contact with the maker community was through organizing the 2nd African Makerspace Gathering in 2020.  It took her some time and reading to understand the concept and ideas behind making and makerspaces.  There were hardly any women in the organization team when Gertrude started her work for the Makerspace Gathering. As a project leader, she had to coordinate and chase her team to get things done – but realized that some would refuse.  “When I faced this challenge, I was asking myself a lot of questions: is it because I am new to the team, or because I am a woman?“ She put in extra hard...
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Sailing on Knowledge Waves

Sailing on Knowledge Waves

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
In 2014, Nave à Vela - a start-up co-founded by GIG member Miguel Chaves in Brazil - has the purpose of, in partnership with schools, building a more meaningful education, promoting increasingly innovative teaching, and respecting the particularities and reality of each school. The mission is to transform schools into places where students' creativity and curiosity awake. They develop activities encouraging them to build knowledge through practices, projects and even life purposes. The Curricular Base for Innovation Culture: a methodology fostering student's development. Nave à Vela (NAV) respects the needs of each school and its particularities. For this reason, it developed an adaptable methodology to fit each school's needs: the Curricular Base for a Culture of Innovation. Designed for kindergarten, elementary school and high school students, it promotes maker learning, in which the student learns by building toys and prototypes and authoring projects. In this process, he starts to have a more exploratory relationship with knowledge and, thus, develops his autonomy. By becoming...
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Learning with Head, Heart and Hand – A Plea for Maker Education

Learning with Head, Heart and Hand – A Plea for Maker Education

By Mugethi Gitau Comment Closed
Global Innovation Gathering is proud to have Junge Tüfler*innen among our members. During workshops, they observe how children are fascinated by plants that make music, plasticine that glows because it can conduct electricity, or a talking poster. When they understand how these things are made, they quickly arrive at the point: "Maybe I can do that, too. I'll try that myself!" Doing things yourself to develop and experience your effectiveness is an essential part of maker education and, accordingly, at the heart of all learning formats. Through project- and problem-based learning, maker education strengthens key future competencies such as communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. A diagram shows the overlap of the 4K model (Communication Collaboration, Creativity, Critical Thinking) with Digital Competencies (Reception, Reflection, Production). Maker spaces offer a near-limitless number of possibilities for exploration: also, digital skills can be taught here. Fascinating: the area for production, i.e. being able to design digital content and systems yourself. Illustration: Carlotta Klee. "Maker Spaces in der Schule: So...
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