EdTech startup Funzi and UNDP Syria have partnered to deliver mobile learning to vulnerable populations in conflict areas.

In a war zone, the sad truth is that education often becomes one of the first casualties, as it is – understandably – pushed back in favour of more urgent and immediate needs such as food and healthcare. The tragedy of it is, however, that this not only affects people’s ability to cope with their immediate situation, but also hampers their post-conflict chances of building a long-term future.

Education often becomes one of the casualties in a conflict situation
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Funzi and UNDP Syria are collaborating to deliver mobile learning to vulnerable populations
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Conflicts in Syria have resulted in shortage of jobs and infrastructure, as well as lack of security in certain parts of the country. This erodes livelihood prospects of Syrians and makes access to relevant information and quality learning evermore essential. Yet UNESCO policy guidelines for mobile learning affirm that mobile devices can help ensure the continuity of education during times of crisis.

Conflicts in Syria have resulted in shortage of jobs and infrastructure
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To help address this, and strengthen the resilience and socio-economic stability of individuals and communities in Syria, Funzi and UNDP Syria have started collaboration to deliver mobile learning, with training modules expected to be launched later this year.

“Mobile learning leverages technology people already own,” explains Tero Salonen, Funzi’s CEO and Founder. ”The cost of mobile teaching is only a fraction compared to traditional means of teaching, making mobile an efficient and effective channel for knowledge transfer, especially in areas of crisis.”

Since essential information and training content are available via mobile phones, he says, learning can happen in areas and at times that may not have been easy to reach

 

“With our service performing well in slower networks and on feature phones, training is easily accessible to vulnerable populations in areas with poor infrastructure. It is also a major step forward towards helping mitigate educational disruptions during times of crisis through mobile learning in order to support swift recoveries of these countries.”

This is a significant milestone for Funzi, a Finnish start-up we covered previously on Tech Trends which is an active member in the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan. When I met their founder Aape Pohjarvita in Helsinki, he was keen to emphasize how he believed mobile would be the most disruptive method of delivering effective learning globally, specially in conflict areas (at the time they had already deployed courses to over 40,000 people in Iraq).

“We at Funzi are committed to supporting the world in achieving peace, meaningful livelihoods, and happiness and health for all through quality education. Thus, this project is a significant milestone that takes us closer to achieving our vision,” agrees Salonen.

Funzi’s service – which is free to end users – delivers learning specifically designed for mobile and personalizes the user experience using similar mechanisms as those leveraged to make mobile games “sticky” such as behavioural and usage patterns.

Mobile learning leverages technology people already own
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Funzi founders Chief Evangelist Aape Pohjavirta, CEO Tero Salonen and co-founder CXO Miemo Penttinen

This is also an important as a test case for exporting Finnish education and for the viability of mobile learning as a delivery mechanism for learning opportunities to vulnerable populations in conflict areas around the world.

Funzi uses mobile gaming mechanisms to personalize learning for its users
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Tailored training modules for UNDP’s local partners and their beneficiaries will be launched as mobile learning on a dedicated site starting late 2017. The goal of the partnership is to promote long-term participation, sustainability, and self-sufficiency of UNDP local partners.

The first phase of learning will equip aid workers, while the second will help vulnerable populations
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Training will be delivered in two phases, with the first one developing essential program lifecycle management skills for UNDP and NGO field staff and the second offering training to vulnerable populations like the displaced, and women- and youth-headed households to support them in achieving social cohesion and sustainable livelihoods.

“Our participation and experience in developing and implementing mobile learning services for displaced populations allow us to create learning programs that are effective in knowledge transfer and skills development, while remaining cost-efficient and scalable,” Salonen concludes.

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Bringing Mobile Learning to Syria appeared first on Tech Trends.

Some fans had the chance to contribute to the voiceover and have their artwork incorporated into the animation as a painting in the Moominhouse.

A campaign to fund an innovative Moomin animation TV series raised more than US$250,000 – over 127% of its initial target –  from 3,701 superfans. Supporters received perks ranging form postcards to an all-inclusive trip to Finland to visit the Moominworld theme park, Söderskär’s lighthouse and the Moomin Museum in Tampere.

We want the animation to be 3D because the books are so atmospheric
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The Gutsy Animations team behind the project includes creative director and executive producer Marika Makaroff; Oscar-winning director Steve Box; BAFTA-winning producer John Woolley and Emmy-winning writing duo Mark Huckerby and Nick Ostler. They will now start development of a cutting-edge 2D/3D hybrid technique, where characters are rendered in 3D in an environment with some 2D illustrative or painterly elements.

“We want the animation to be 3D in large part because the books are so atmospheric. As a reader, you can really sense the environment – it’s an important part of Tove’s work.” Explains director Steve Box. “3D will allow us to create a lighting and an atmosphere that has that same effect. We want to show the depth of feeling and experience within the original stories, but to retain a sense of the graphic/illustrative look of the original books. It’s something I’ve struggled to find any other examples of, which I think is because it has been so difficult to do before now. Thankfully, technology is catching up with these kinds of ambitions and the capability is now here.”

The much-loved creation of novelist, painter, illustrator and comic book artist Tove Jansson, Moomintroll is one of Finland’s biggest cultural exports with the original books having been translated into over 50 languages and the previous animation broadcast in 124 territories.

“Even though we are all familiar with the characters, this will be the first time they will have been created in 3D for the moving image. As anyone who has been handed 2D artwork and had to translate it into three dimensions will tell you, it’s not a straightforward process,” Explains producer John Wooley. “We spent a long time analysing the characters and identifying what drives them emotionally, what their strengths are and, just as importantly, what their flaws are. This will be reflected in the characters’ body language and consequently how they are rigged and animated.”

The production company already have buyers lining up to show the finished product, with Finnish public broadcaster Yle appropriately being the first one to sign an agreement to broadcast the first two series of thirteen episodes in spring 2019. They are also in talks with major networks in the UK, US and Japan, where Moomintroll is also very popular.

“We knew that a new television series would be hugely popular with Moomin fans, but we are completed bowled over by the excitement and enthusiasm that we’ve seen in response to the campaign,” says Marika Makaroff, CEO of Gutsy Animations. “We will now be able to give fans what they deserve – which is the most faithful Moomin animation there has ever been. We won’t shy away from the complexity and depth found in Tove Jansson’s original stories and the result will be a beautiful and heartfelt series that appeals to the whole family. We will be sharing new visual concepts, behind-the-scenes stories and clips as the production progresses and are so excited to take fans on this journey with us.”

The animation is being developed with the full support of Moomin Characters, the business set up by Tove Jansson and her brother Lars to manage the Moomin brand. To this day Moomin Characters is run by family members with Sophia Jansson, Lars’s daughter and Tove’s niece, as Chairman of the Board and Creative Director. Sophia said: “Tove gave the inhabitants of Moominvalley the values of tolerance, love, respect, friendship and bravery – which are needed in today’s world more than ever. We’re very excited to have a wonderful team who shares these values bringing Moomin to life in a new way for fans young and old.”

The animation is being developed with the support of Tove Jansson's Moomin Characters
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“As we wanted to have a Nordic influence in the visual development, we’ve been working with the Piñata team, based in Helsinki. They have an understanding of the changing nature of light across the seasons in the Nordic region that Steve and I don’t have,” adds Woolley. “We needed to communicate a surreal quality as well as an emotional subtlety in Tove Jansson’s work with a visual language of equal sophistication. A fully 3D built world with generic volumetric lighting wasn’t going to do that so we had to come up with something new.  The characters and foreground elements will be built in 3D but we will make extensive use of matte paintings much like backdrops in a theatre. The characters will then be surfaced and lit sympathetically with the environments.”

For companies looking to gain a competitive edge through technology, Tech Trends offers strategic Virtual Reality and Digital Transformation Consultancy services tailored to your brand.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Crowdfunding Brings Moomin to Life in 3D appeared first on Tech Trends.

As a techie, I count Helsinki as one of my favourite cities – It’s a hotbed of innovation and has a vibrant start-up scene – but there’s a lot more to the city than geeking out. 

I regularly visit for events such as Slush – which has become one of the largest tech conferences in the global calendar – and a few months ago was invited to be the city’s resident blogger and cover the Millennium Technology Prize. But one can’t live on algorithms alone, and if the idea of sampling Finland’s cuisine doesn’t immediately excite you, it’s time you thought again. There are plenty of fantastic gastronomic options in town, and I thought I’d share some of them here:

Traditional Fare

“Typical” Finnish food is hard to define exactly. The country has been independent for less than 100 years, so what you get is a mix of influences from its legacy of being part of Sweden, then the Russian empire – think vodka, caviar and beetroot (you see beetroot burgers on a lot of menus). On the Swedish side, if you’re one of those people who go to Ikea to get your meatball fix, you should stop by Café Engel for tasty and very large portions of the stuff, complete with mash, gravy and cranberries (which work surprisingly well together).

Typical Finnish food is hard to define exactly, but Russian and Swedish influences are prominent
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Cafe Engel Meatballs

To see what a typical meal in Lapland looks like, head to Savotta. It’s the kind of place that could feel really gimmicky with the staff wearing traditional attire and a menu featuring things like reindeer stew and bear salami. However, the homely décor comes across as genuine and the staff is friendly, not seeming to resent the uniform in the slightest. We had a selection of entrées which included bear salami (I passed on that but my husband assured me that it was nice enough, although “it’s difficult to tell with salami”. His slow-cooked lamb stew, served in a traditional (gigantic) wooden bowl, was amazingly tender, and the reindeer had a surprisingly delicate flavour, much more subtle than venison. Do save room for pudding though. Not only does the dessert menu come etched on a silver birch log, but the light and sumptuous blueberry cake is a revelation. Blueberry seems to be the national fruit of choice, perhaps because the colour matches the Finnish flag, so you’ll see it featured in many desserts across town.

Traditional Finnish starters at Savotta

Waterside Dining

3 way herring

I enjoyed many great meals in Helsinki, but the beautiful Meripavilionki takes some beating. Located on a pier overhanging the water. It is understandably popular and not very big so making a reservation is definitely advised (we did not get in the first time we tried so booked to come back the next day). The waterside location is ideal for sampling local seafood, beautifully prepared and exquisitely presented. My prawn dish was delicately balanced and the lightly smoked salmon main perfectly cooked. Our favourite was my husband’s starter though, a 3-way mackerel plate showcasing the humble little fish in various cooked and pickled forms. Perfect spot for a relaxed lunch or romantic dinner.

Sushi Buffets

Recently, in San Francisco, my friend (who’s a self-confessed sushi snob) took me to a hidden-away restaurant where we had a meal so extraordinarily good I’m still having trouble believing it was real. That deserves a separate article of course, but my point is that there’s sushi, and then there’s sushi. In Finland the all-you-can-eat buffet options like Konnichiwa, Käpylän Majakka and Kin Sushi are quite popular with those who are not sushi snobs. I feel able to enjoy both kinds of experience, so think the buffets can be a good option for a tasty and good value lunch, although I tend to avoid the more mayonnaise-heavy creations which the Finns seem to be fond of.

All-you-can-eat sushi buffets are a good budget option for lunch in Helsinki
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Local Beers

Helsinki Local Beers – Il Birri

If you’re into that sort of thing (and if you aren’t, what’s wrong with you?) it’s nice to sample some local craft beers in the sunshine when hitting a new town. Most restaurants in Helsinki stock at least a couple of local brews such as Karjala or Lammin, and the city has several lovely bars that and microbreweries where you can get a good variety of different styles on tap. If you’re around in the summer when the days are ridiculously long, you have plenty of time to sample all the different kinds before it even starts to get dark.

Most pubs and breweries also serve food with a laid back and cosy atmosphere
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Most pubs and breweries also serve food, and the atmosphere is usually cosy and laid back. My favourite find was Bier Bier which – as you’d expect – had a fantastic selection of beers in bottles and on tap, plus some of the most comfortable pub furniture I’ve ever sat on. I like a place that makes it hard for you to leave. Other central options include Il Birri and Bryggeri Helsinki, but if you’ve got a couple of days to look around, it’s definitely worth taking a short boat trip from the market square to the fortress island of Suomelina. Once there, just follow the signs to the brewery for more local delights. After a bracing walk you’ll have earned a pint or two.

Street Food

Street Food is definitely a thing in the Nordic countries, and Finland is no exception. Helsinki hosts a huge extravaganza in March that lasts for several days, but there are celebrations of street food culture happening throughout the year. When I was there in May every square in town got taken over by one such event where anybody is allowed to sell their food wares without a specific licence. There’s something really nice about the organized and good-natured chaos it generates, not to mention the cloud of delicious smells as you walk through. Some of the setups are quite elaborate and professional-looking, while others constitute of little more than a Tupperware dish on a folding bench. What brings it all together is a philosophy that the act of cooking and eating food is a joyful thing to be shared with friends and strangers alike.

Helsinki hosts regular street food extravaganzas
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Coffee and Pastries

Finns REALLY love their coffee, and per capita they consume more than any other nation in the world (a whopping 12 kilos per person per year) which might have something to do with those long months of darkness they have to endure in winter. In Helsinki there’s no shortage of the sort of upmarket craft roastery setup you’d expect to find in places like London or San Francisco, as well as some pretty decent chains such as Espresso House and Robert’s Coffee providing a quick and classy alternative to your usual Starbucks (which inevitably also has a presence in town). Karl Fazer is a nice option in the centre mainly because it offers an array of typical pastries. My favourite of those was a sweet (which I can’t recall the name of, would welcome input in the comments!) looking a bit like a pig’s nose and made from potato flour. You also get a free chocolate with your coffee, which is always a plus.

On the quirkier side, I’d recommend trying Andante, a hybrid of coffee house and flower shop, which means the place not only smells wonderful, but looks beautiful. My barista was Japanese, and a perfectionist bordering on obsessive. My coffee took a long time because he made it again after not being happy with the first try. Worth the wait though.

Finns REALLY love their coffee and consume more per capita than any other nation
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Plootu Furniture shop and Cafe

That mind-set of s “why have one shop when you can have two?” also applies to my favourite Helsinki find, a little place in the design district, Plootu, is a furniture shot/ café. Choose your poison, and then sip it while perching on the wonderful designer and vintage wares. The only downside is that you might be tempted to buy some pretty expensive and large items. I for one was thankful that my own suitcase limitations saved my credit card from a taking a serious beating. It reminded me of a passage in Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, where the owner of a shop selling crystal glasses is convinced by the book’s protagonist to serve cool mint tea to passers-by, thus vastly increasing his sales as customers swear the tea tasted better when supped from the beautiful crystal. That concept that beautiful objects can also be practical, and that are meant to be used, is at the very heart of Finnish design.

The idea that beautiful objects and furniture should be practical - and damn comfortable - is at the heart of Finnish design
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Liquorice

Liquorice, like Marmite, tends to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Although I’m very much on the ‘hate’ camp, I felt that it was such a big part of local gastronomy that I ought to give it another chance. At Graniittilinna I had a liquorice-infused Crème brûlée and at Savotta I tried their liquorice ice cream. Both, to my surprise and delight, extremely tasty and not at all overpowering. I’m still not a convert to the actual candy, but I do urge doubters to come to Helsinki with an open mind towards the black stuff.

Liquorice, like Marmite, tends to be one of those love-it-or-hate-it things
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Liquorice Creme Brullet at Graniittilinna

Sauna Sausages

Yes, you read that right, and no, it’s not a euphemism. Yes Finns go to sauna naked, but it’s just not a thing, except for foreigners, since locals use them regularly pretty much from the time they are born. Because they’re also seen as places to socialize, it is common to eat and drink during a sauna session, and there are usually break areas outside the actual sauna (Sauna Hermanni is one of those) where you can have drinks – not unusual to have beer, and many places let you bring in your own, up to a reasonable limit – and snacks. And that’s where the sausage comes in (get your mind out of the gutter please!) because traditionally you’d roast them on top of the coals in the stove, either wrapped in foil or hanging from a string on top. Clearly that works out better in the traditional wood-fired setups rather than the more modern stoves, but you can still find those around if you look.

Yes Finns go to sauna naked, but it’s just not a thing, except for foreigners
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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Finnish Your Food appeared first on Tech Trends.

How this Finnish EdTech start-up is combining AI and Machine Learning with social media platform mechanics to deliver innovative learning.

Claned Co-founder Vesa Perala believes that instead of attempting to retrofit technology to out-dated educational systems, EdTech start-ups should be helping to write a new rulebook.

I think being radical is the only way of doing things, because slow iteration doesn’t really work.
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“Our pitch pretty much begins with education reform. The starting point is that the Finnish schooling system might be perceived as being the best in the world, but we’re still overhauling it,” he says.

For the past 3 years, Claned has been in what he describes as semi-stealth mode, focusing on developing a robust artificial intelligence system that uses machine-learning algorithms to map out what factors most impact individual learning.

Our pitch pretty much begins with education reform
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That knowledge, he says, was already out there, because it’s something universities routinely do. Over time, tutors build an understanding of how each student learns, yet that data is trapped in a system which simply isn’t scalable. Claned set out to solve this by combining these tried-and-tested academic evaluation metrics with machine learning algorithms and Artificial Intelligence.

“We created this personal social learning environment where we can track every single interaction a student has, whether it’s with a piece of content, with other students or with their teachers. We’re constantly gathering information about how a particular student is learning, and then feed that data back to the student in the form of recommendations of additional study materials, mentors, and anything else that can optimise their learning journey”

The next challenge was to present all these complex and evolving datasets through an intuitive interface. For that, Perala admits that they took inspiration from a broad variety of social networks and applications.

Claned uses familiar features from platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and even Tinder
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“We replicated features from popular platforms that students would already be familiar with, everything from Facebook to Pinterest,” he says, showing me how they even incorporated a rather Tinder-esque swipe mechanism into the workflow.

“We call ourselves a start-up for old people,” laughs Perala, himself a youthful-looking 45-year old. “We have a couple of youngsters but everybody else has at least 15 to 20 years experience.”

That experience, he believes, is what helped the company build its unique proposition, which is founded on algorithm metrics based on years of rigorous academic research and analytics:

“Our CEO Mervi Palander has analysed over 3000 separate knowledge management systems during her career. She started organising Nokia’s E-learning activities back in the mid-90s.”

When they looked at what the next generation of learning systems needed to look like, however, they became convinced that it would need to be mobile. Which is why they’re now gearing up for the launch of their native iOS and Android apps.

“Education in the future will be two things: Mobile and personalised. All content needs to be relevant to the user on a personal level, and they should be able to access that content wherever they are. The true paradigm shift will happen when those two factors converge seamlessly, and we will provide both of them. “

They are also launching a marketplace to enable content providers, including teachers and students, to buy and sell learning materials. Anything from lecture notes to lesson plans could be shared and monetised through the platform, with Claned taking a 30% commission on the sale of paid-for materials.

Education in the future will be two things: Mobile and personalised
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The content recommended through the platform is based solely on personal relevance and learning effectiveness, however, and those materials can be in any format, either free or commercial. For publishers this certainly represents an attractive additional sales channel for their content, where they can potentially make higher returns through micro-transactions rather than relying on subscription and bulk sales revenues:

“It’s really valuable for content providers to be able to see the data around how individual bits of content are being consumed, and it will eventually allow them to fine-tune their offering. If 50% of your readers drop off after page 3 in a text, for example, maybe there’s something there that you need to fix there. Or you know that this particular piece of content works well for that particular group of people, so you make more of that.”

The commercial opportunity that personalised learning represents is undoubtedly huge. The education market is worth over 300 billion Euros annually, 100 billion of which falls under E-learning. This is reflected in the fact that, even flying under the radar until now, Claned already attracted over 4 million Euros in investment and has just launched a very healthy-looking equity Crowdfunding campaign to raise another €500,000.

Claned already attracted over 4 million Euros in investment
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Yet like Funzi and other Finnish start-ups I spoke to in the EdTech sector, they don’t see a conflict between building a sustainable business and making education tools accessible. Claned propose to do this by keeping the product free to individuals while charging subscription fees from institutions and corporations. The marketplace will allow them to monetize commercial content while their data will also enable them to provide premium services such as generating tailored courses based on individual learning profiles.

“So the future vision would be that if you decide you want to do this biology course, for example, we can then piece together a course and materials which are individually tailored to you. We don’t sell you the materials themselves, as we don’t own them, but we can sell you the service of generating that course for you.”

The industry, says Perala, has been talking about personalised learning for decades now, but nobody has been quite able to pull it off. Being student-centric is not a new concept in itself, but achieving it in practice is something else entirely, and the content agnostic approach Claned is adopting is a crucial part of that

“We start personalising your learning path, and the content that paves that path can come from anywhere. It can be a Wikipedia page or a YouTube video, or a chapter of a book, because we index everything that can be machine read, and we keep that content so you can annotate them, etc. This not only works to drive up interaction, but gives us more accurate and granular data so we can optimize the learning process even further.”

Another key element to their proposition is leveraging social interaction and collaboration. “there’s a ton of evidence showing that once people start interacting with others, better learning takes place, whether that’s in the real world or in virtual environments.”

In one pilot they saw collaboration increase by about 500% compared to anything else that had been used in class before, including social platforms such as Facebook. The feedback they had was that students found the process to be more interactive than dealing with their teachers and classmates face-to-face.

Students found Claned more collaborative than face-to-face interactions
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Although Claned initially targeted the platform to university-level students, the plan is to expand this to other age groups as well, allowing students to start building their personalized profiles earlier on and evolve them over time:

“Your Claned learning profile is yours to keep. You can make parts of that public, private, or share it selectively with individuals, it’s incredibly flexible.”

As Perala shows me what the learning path for a student looks like, I’m struck by how detailed the information is. Individual learning sessions are mapped out, and you can see how long they spend on each subject or lesson. This data, when cross-referenced with that of other students on the same course, can help to identify bumps on the road and optimize learning:

“We can look at a med school course and see, for example, that these two topics were the ones that students found the most challenging. The teacher then is able to adjust the learning curve based on their student’s orientation and strengths, providing additional grounding and materials beforehand, or recapping afterwards. It takes the pressure off individual students, who often will not speak up when having difficulties.”

The student’s ability to track their progress in real time helps boost motivation and focus, he believes. “it encourages learners to take more responsibility for their own studies, but the challenge – which is reflected in the high drop-out rates in MOOCS and other online courses – is to get that feedback loop just right, finding the right balance between challenge and skill level. Optimal experiences feed optimal performance – as renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asserts, “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”

Personalising Learning with Artificial Intelligence
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Students learn how to learn through this system
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This is similar to the way that activity sensors such as Fitbit use our visualised data as motivators (think of the nice feeling you get when you reach that 10,000 steps goal) but merely showing data to the users could actually be counter-productive, as a learner who perceives that they are falling behind can quickly become demotivated. The goal, instead, is to encourage students to use successful strategies to help them accomplish more effective learning practices, scaffolding and enhancing the learning process at every step.

“The students basically learn how to learn through this system, continuously building their own learning portfolio over time. We use a combination of short-and long-term goal setting as well as time management planning and evaluation. The idea is that instead of trying to spend as much time as possible trying to memorise content, it is more effective to use focused learning intervals to accomplish pre-set goals.”

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Personalising Learning with Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Tech Trends.

It’s another improbably sunny day in Helsinki; I’m told by the locals it’s not usually like this, but so far in a country best known for its Winter Wonderland landscapes I’ve been getting a tan.

Mehackit teaches young people programming through robotics, music and visual arts
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Finns are hospitable people and they also feel the urge to soak up the sun while it shines, so we head out to have our chat at a charming local restaurant to make the most of it. My hosts are (Co-founder & Troublemaker) Pia Henrietta Kekäläinen and (Chief Communications Officer & Wizard) Reetta Heiskanen from Mehackit, a start-up that teaches young people programming through an engaging mix of robotics, music and visual arts.

We want to teach young people technological self-confidence and the attitude that they can learn anything
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I start off by asking Henrietta about the road that led her to becoming an entrepreneur. Anecdotally, my impression of the start-up sector in Finland is that it has a healthy dose of female representation at all levels, and I ask her if it might have something to do with the country’s progressive laws which, for example, allow either parent to take generous parental leave as they choose.

I don’t have any official figures around female entrepreneurship in Finland compared to other countries, but I feel it is getting better. The biggest issue is still around investment, because a lot of the investor networks were traditionally male-only clubs, which made it extremely difficult for female entrepreneurs to make the connections needed to fund their ideas.

That said, it seems like Finland is well-placed to lead the way in addressing that problem. Back in 1906, while they were still part of the Russian Empire, the Grand Duchy of Finland was the first country in Europe to grant universal suffrage, which meant that all women, without exception, were eligible to vote and run for office as equals. In 1907 they elected an unprecedented 19 female members to its parliament. Today, with 40% female representation in government, they stand only behind Sweden in that particular metric.

Finland was the first country in Europe to grant women universal suffrage
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Six years ago Henrietta also considered embarking upon a government career, as she has always been interested in diplomacy. She spent a very interesting few months working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, where she organised the media program for dignitary visits, such as that of Vladimir Putin.

I learned a lot and had a lot of fun, but in the end my boss advised me that he thought that I needed something more fast-paced. That’s when I got involved with the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society.

This was back in the early days of Startup Sauna, which began as an informal gathering and eventually gave rise to hugely successful initiatives like Slush and fostered the growth of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in Finland.

Henrietta also became involved in teaching digital skills through her involvement in Rail Girls, a non-profit organisation that equips women and girls with the tools and inspiration to engage with technology.

We're great at being consumers but we want students to get their hands dirty with wires, sensors, and syntax errors
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These experiences helped pave the way for co-founding Mehackit in 2014, which she describes as a one-stop shop for schools to jump into creative technology education. The format focuses on providing a human mentor to initiate youths into technology principles and spark their interest developing digital skills.

I think that we are great at being consumers, but there’s a huge paradox in making the products so easy to use you don’t need skills, and thus keeping many people away from the process of actually creating it. We want to take down that curtain of simplicity, so to say, and get people’s hands dirty with wires and sensors and live loops and syntax errors.

During the 7-week course, pupils advance at their own pace and build personal projects, which can be as diverse as they like. Local university students are recruited as instructors, but school teachers can also participate and learn without the pressure of being the “technology experts” that can often be daunting when teaching digital natives.

During the 7-week course, pupils advance at their own pace and build personal and diverse technology projects
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The education system in Finland is one of the most well-regarded in the world, but it is also one that’s not prone to rest on its laurels. This makes it a good environment to test out innovative technology-based solutions, and it often leads the way in educational policy. So much so that starting this year coding will become a mandatory part of the school curriculum.

Coding became part of the school curriculum in Finland in 2016
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Mehackit are now looking to expand from high school to upper secondary level, and is also gearing up for international roll-outs in other Nordic markets like Norway and Sweden before moving on to countries like the UK, where the government has acknowledged the seriousness of the digital skills gap problem.

We want to bring technological self-confidence to youth, and the “I can learn anything” attitude is what is going to be extremely important to progress us as a species as the world around us shifts to a more automated society.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Teaching Programming with Creative Hacking appeared first on Tech Trends.

“Evangelist” is an overhyped term in tech, yet Chief Evangelist Aape Pohjavirta makes it work.

His enthusiasm is contagious, and after a few minutes chatting about Funzi – the start-up he founded two years ago – I feel like I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid. Maybe it was the strong Finnish coffee that gave me that buzz, or perhaps it was the fact that Aape can use terms like ‘futurification’ without making it sound like empty nonsense. This is clearly a man on a mission, which he casually outlines as we sit in a swanky Helsinki coffee shop:

“We want a world with no wars, where everyone is healthy, happy and has a job.”

But what, I ask, are his more ambitious goals?


He laughs, but there’s no mistaking that the goals are deadly serious, he’s got an  impressive track record to back them up. Having been involved with education technology since the 80s, he collaborated with some of the early Apple pioneers. Over the decades that followed, he experienced the hype around e-learning and multimedia as well as the meteoric rise of social media and mobile. But, he says, they all failed to live up to the promise of truly revolutionising education.

“The education industry is fragmented and works in silos. There is no global driver. When you look at EdTech companies they usually start off by segmenting themselves by topic, language and geography, so you cannot scale, you’re always just jumping from niche to niche.”

As a friend of his – Chief Technology Officer at Stanford University’s School of Education Paul Kim – once put it, the current education system is simply incapable of reforming itself because everyone in the system is already a product of that system, so disruption needs to come from outside.

“You don’t need any new inventions in order to digitise the whole system of education delivery. Everything you need is already there. The only reason why this hasn’t happened is because publishers of educational books have always been hugely profitable, so disruption in that space won’t come from them. We’re doing to education exactly what Google did to search. We’re destroying other people’s business because other people’s businesses have been wrong.”

We want a world with no wars, where everyone is healthy, happy and has a job
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In order to really shake things up, they started by first looking at how people were using their mobile devices, and how they would best learn through them. Funzi essentially works on the premise that when people can focus on learning the things that they’re good at, and that they’re interested in, education – delivered through technology – can have a much bigger impact

“It’s not about doing the same things better, but about doing better things. We’re using mobile to liberate people from education so they have the freedom to learn.”

Their business model is based on learning outcomes, where user have access to all the content for free, but pay for certification if they wish to validate that learning externally. It’s a powerful concept, since users can be confident that the course works for them before ever making a payment – if they make it at all. And looking at the numbers, that strategy does seem to make the product very ‘sticky,’ meaning that 20 out of every 100 users that try it come back the next day, week and month, with sessions averaging 8 minutes. Impressive stats in an age of information overload and short attention spans.

“It’s a false choice between free learning and monetising, you can have both in this system. We can optimise the way that any learning is delivered anywhere, and we can do this at not cost to the user while still enabling the creation of valuable content and lucrative businesses.”

Another false paradigm, he says, is that EdTech is a competitive market: “This is a 6 trillion dollar a year industry that has to be digitised. 1 percent of that is still $60 billion. Divide that among a thousand different companies and that’s still $60 million each, so could you please tell me where the competition is?”

It’s not about doing the same things better, but about doing better things
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“We’re empowering people with skills to build their dreams” Aape says, pointing to the fact that over 40,000 people have taken their entrepreneurship course in Iraq alone. “We see from implementation how practical knowledge drives the birth of new communities and adds life to existing ones. It’s the desire and curiosity to learn new things that keeps us humans alive.”

At the same time, the global refugee crisis broke out, and like many in the tech community, Funzi felt compelled to help in any way they could (TechCrunch Editor Mike Butcher has been organising such global initiatives under the Techfugees umbrella since last year), so they leveraged the platform’s capabilities and scalability to help streamline the arrival and assimilation process for refugees—from finding reception centres and applying for asylum, to figuring out schools, work permits and the local language.

We’re empowering people with skills to build their dreams
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The next step in scaling up will be working with partners to reach users and deliver learning that’s relevant to them. “We know, for example, that there are 471 million Facebook users on mobile who said they were interested in education. Those are the people we’ll be targeting,” says Aarpe, who’s also cautiously optimistic about Facebook’s own education ambitions:

“We were at F8 (Facebook’s Developer Conference) this year and when I listened to MZ’s (Mark Zuckerberg) keynote it sounded like he was using my script,” he recalls. “From what I heard, he understands the huge responsibility that his organization has. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, right or wrong, but I do know he has a genuine interest in pushing the envelope in the only field that can ever really change the way the world works, and that’s education. At least he’s doing something… And when you look at the proposition, to deliver personalised, free learning to anyone, anywhere, what could be more beautiful, or more democratising? That’s exactly what we’re going to enable.”

To deliver personalised, free learning to anyone, anywhere, what could be more beautiful?
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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Funzifying Mobile Learning appeared first on Tech Trends.