By Kenji Saito | Representative Director
Please find a Japanese version of this report here.
On November 23 and 24, 2013, 10 children from Fukushima participated in our ideathon camp in Tokyo for designing smartphone applications to make their home towns in Fukushima better places to live in. Those children were high school, junior high school and elementary school students who have participated in our past camps, except one elementary school student who was new to Academy Camp.
On the first day, after bullet/express train ride from Fukushima to Tokyo, they started their discussion at the office of Mozilla Japan, a world-renowned open source software organization, and then visited Keio University's SFC (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) Open Research Forum to see research exhibition and to participate in the discussion session dedicated for them. They stayed in National Olympics Memorial Youth Center for the night. On the next day, they organized their ideas at co-working space CERO in Akihabara, with professional programmers and designers.
Through this camp, the children have come up with about 10 different proposals on smartphone applications that help making their home towns better places to live in: a virtual discussion space to bring together people's ideas on cool Fukushima, a map that accumulates quizzes on people's discoveries about their towns, local currency based on bringing up virtual characters, etc. We have been coordinating volunteer forces so that these applications will be realized, and the children will be involved in the implementation process.
One core idea that lies under those proposed software is that to make Fukushima cool, the children as the leaders of the next generations themselves need to be cool first. The concept was born on a discussion table at Keio SFC Open Research Forum, and was put forth by a junior high school girl at the end of the session. She said "Academy Camp is there so that we can make ourselves cooler. We should better continue to participate in the camps."
PLEASE HELP THEM CONTINUE TO JOIN OUR CAMPS!
Please support our activities so that the junior high school girl and many others like her can continue to participate in our camps to explore their potentials to change the world arount them.
Academy Camp is participating in GlobalGiving's 2013 Year-end Bonus Challenge. GlobalGiving is offering nine bonus awards to the top projects that raise the most money from their supporters throughout this month. To qualify for a bonus award, we must raise at least US $3,000 from 30 unique donors by the end of December 2013.
We would really appreciate your continuing support!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
