Stimulate the creativity of young talents and offer them the opportunity to approach the world of research by encouraging their study of the STEM disciplines. This is the objective of the “Siamo tutti Leonardo” (We Are All Leonardo) competition of ideas, the initiative promoted by the Leonardo-Civiltà delle Macchine Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research that the schools of every order and degree participated in for the 2019-2020 academic year. The competition was also a tangible occasion to give the schools an additional opportunity to grow and actively take part in the artificial intelligence and robotics sectors.
This morning the winning schools of the competition received their awards from the Italian Minister of Education Patrizio Bianchi, in the attendance of Leonardo Chairman Luciano Carta, Leonardo CEO Alessandro Profumo and Leonardo-Civiltà delle Macchine Foundation Chairman Luciano Volante.
“The prizewinning students conceived and designed during the most difficult period, that of the pandemic, which for them meant long months of schools closed and remote education. They all transfused a dream into their projects: contribute toward improving the planet and society through machinery, robots or sustainable technologies,” Leonardo Chairman Luciano Carta emphasised. “It is also for this reason that young people are to be urged and trained with the study of the STEM subjects. In 2021, Leonardo launched the Education & Digital Humanities programme to promote the STEM culture in Italian schools for children and teens 6 to 18 years old. And to contribute to the implementation of the technical colleges, we have assigned one of the plants of the former Galileo area in Florence to serve as the new headquarters of the ITS Prime Foundation.”
“To remain on the frontier of the new technologies, businesses need the energy, passion and creativity of the young people,” said Leonardo CEO Alessandro Profumo. “This is why,” he added, “we are strongly committed to the development of the STEM disciplines, with the objective of providing students with a mathematical training placed side by side with humanities skills, a mixture necessary to develop complex thinking and the ability to process data: a crucial factor in the new digital world.”
“The Leonardo-Civiltà delle Macchine Foundation intends to contribute to the educational requirements of the country by stimulating interest in the STEM disciplines, with special attention paid to the sustainability of the new technologies and to their impact on society,” stressed Luciano Violante. “With this initiative, which we will certainly confirm for the next academic year as well, we want to continue to encourage the creativity of the young people of schools of every order and degree while increasingly promoting the technological skills in the education system. It is precisely for this reason, with the latest issue of the ‘Civiltà delle Macchine’ magazine, that the Leonardo Foundation put forward the proposal to transform the technical colleges into technological high schools. We are also working on the making of a video to emphasise the need for technological training through a conversation between a girl, the psychiatrist Paolo Crepet and the astronaut Roberto Vittori. In agreement with the Italian Ministry of Education, the video is planned to be published on the portal of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and on that of the Foundation to be available to all the schools.”
Photo credit: MIUR