Since my last posting, we have been quite busy with our work with the Puerta 18 team. Let me share some aspects.
During our work in the Puerta 18 office, we also have quite some opportunity to observe how they work with the kids. Take the example of the daily activity: It is part of Puerta 18's program to offer one activity per day. The current activities are presented at the "green table", where all kids and coordinators come together. Today, it was Flash animation. The idea was to create an animation of e.g. an animal that is eating some food - the food should move into the animal's mouth.
Our colleague Rob worked next to one of the kids and followed the instructions of ever-patient and friendly coordinator Stefanie. She really has a great way of breaking down the task into steps that were easy to follow and execute. This task is designed to be achievable within a few hours, so the kids have a successful result at the end. Especially new kids, being at Puerta 18 for the first time, have an easy access to participation here. The general idea is that from here, the kids get to know different technologies and develop their own ideas for projects. They can form teams and collaborate on whatever they like - as long as it has to do with any of the technology aspects that Puerta 18 can offer. The coordinators assist in finding such ideas, building teams, and working on the projects.
For our scope of work, we made quite some progress. Yesterday, we had a Skype call with Kane Milne from High Tech Youth Network in New Zealand. He and Puerta 18 director Federico know each other from Clubhouse Network activities. Puerta 18 is member of this network, and Kane also was active in this network - however, the large distance from New Zealand to any network conferences or meetings that are mostly taking place in the USA, made it very difficult (and expensive!) to participate. He then founded the High Tech Youth Network. For us, this means he has experience with opening new locations and running them - and thus could give us many insights in the resulting tasks and challenges.
We now have to process a lot of information. Our team work changes between group work and breaking down tasks for individual work - so every one of our four team members (not only the three SAP people, but also our project assistant Juan Manuel are fully dedicated and passionate about the project!) can work separately. After some time, we then get back together and review our individual stuff - so everything is aligned and fits together.
One of the tasks was creating a questionnaire for the kids. Rob has a lot of experiences here, as he comes from marketing. Together with Juan Manuel and the Puerta 18 team, he prepared and launched it today - we hope to get further input for the section of our scope of work that will illustrate both the philosophy (including vision and mission) and the success stories - aiming at attracting potential sponsors. The first ten kids already participated, and it already looks promising. During the next weeks, we will continue running this.
 |
| The green table (look at the photo, and you will understand where the name comes from!): The kids and the coordinators gather to talk about the daily activities |
 |
| In the middle of the daily activity: Coordinator Stefanie explains how to create a Flash animation - Rob is participating, Janice is watching |
 |
| Yesterday, we saw the kids creating this overview about breakthrough inventions around communication - today, I am appreciating the result |
