SLOVAK LOCAL PILOT PROJECT "OPEN FUTURE" STARTED ITS FULL OPERATION 

Pontis Foundation in cooperation with City of Trnava, opened on 26 November 2019 a unique after school Centre – Open Future. In its first year 25 children enrolled in the programme so they can experience the unknown world of innovations and technologies they wouldn´t otherwise have access to. The aim is to help them build up skills through working on their very own projects for their community or region.  This three years long programme will be facilitated and supported by top experts from Slovak business environment.  

The educational programme is for children aged between 11 and 15 and its aim is to provide them, without exception, opportunity to learn more about current technologies, innovations and the business sector, while strengthening their IT skills, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. In this sense, they will be motivated to work on their own development, work harder in school and in a long run be motivated to get quality education and be prepared for the challenging labour market of the 21st century.
The Centre is opened for children four times a week, in the after-school hours. During those three years they will be part of the programme, they will participate in number of workshops led by Slovak top business or science personalities such as the Slovak astrobiologist Michaela Musilova, who works for NASA or Lucia Šickova, co-founder of the world known Slovak company Pixel Federation. At the same time, the children will have the opportunity to visit a number of interesting companies and places and get access to innovative technologies such as virtual medicine or self-steering cars.
The preparation and setting up of the Centre was supported also within the Social(i)Makers project as its social innovations local pilot. The knowledge and information from the S(i)M Social Innovation Academy proved to be a valuable source of information in assessing the programme as a business model and in engaging different types of stakeholders. S(i)M sources will be exploited also in working on its impact assessment.