SDG Summer School

Introduction

In September 2015, world leaders committed to 17 Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. Over the next 15 years, governments will strive to achieve goals such as ending extreme poverty, fighting inequality and tackling climate change. To achieve these goals, we need to enable today’s youth to play an active and meaningful role in tackling the SDGs.

The motivation of the SDG Summer School 2017 is for teams of University students, in close collaboration with UN organisations, to conceive ways to use open data, crowdsourcing technologies, and low-cost open source solutions to tackle sustainable development in ways that even schoolchildren can participate in, and develop prototypes suitable for deployment.

Philosophy

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The SDG Summer School is all about team-based problem solving and hands-on prototype development, going from a conception phase during the first part of the school in Geneva, to producing practical demos during the Summer Project, and finally during the Tsinghua part working with Chinese teachers, schoolchildren and the unique Chinese maker movement, to make prototypes suitable for deployment in schools. The overarching goal is to impact school-based science classes, by enabling tomorrow’s innovators to participate actively in tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges, today. This focus is inspired by the 120th anniversary of Jean Piaget, father of the field of child developmental psychology. Piaget, who worked at University of Geneva for 50 years, encouraged several generations of educators to embrace hands-on modes of learning, which are at the heart of the crowdsourced creativity that this programme seeks to foster.

Old editions

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For more information, you can consult the pages dedicated to the old editions of the summer schools:

- Summer School 2017