María Laura
Ramírez Galleguillos
ODISEA
ODISEA was a technological NGO whose purpose is to impulse children and youth to become the change agents the world needs. This was accomplished by supporting children and youth to create and develop technology, science, and innovation projects generating impact in their local community.
In Chile, children under 18 years old represent around 17% of the population, but they do not have any social representation. In this sense, even when Odisea started as a way to motivate students with their learning process by making classes more engaging, it ended as a project to propose children and youth as agents of social change. In Odisea social issues were understood as creativity issues, so the best answer was to involve the most creative group of society, children and youth, in the process of creating solutions to these problems.
Odisea has been financed by StartUp-Chile, supported by “Estamoscomprometidos” of UN, Ashoka, and Socialab, and received donations from Google and Amazon.
Odisea Method
The first approach to impulse projects from children and youth was the Odisea Method in which students and teachers go through a semester workshop applying this process for project development. It was co-created with teachers and students for almost two years, and follows the next stages:
The students start observing problems in their community or social context from which they choose one to work on. They will defeat their assumptions working on teams to propose a challenge that generates local impact. The next stage is to ideate ways to work on the challenge, applying their creativity and trying to solve it when they create prototypes. Then, they will evaluate the performance of their projects and iterate by testing it, achieving the final stage, that is to show the experience by presenting the knowledge acquired during the process with new concepts and knowledge generated and the results of it.
With this method, different workshops have been conducted in public schools to validate it and improve it, from which several projects regarding the SDG's have been created by children and teens.
