Abstract:

Premise:
The worldwide growth in research across all scientific fields and the following emphasis on technology transfer have provided knowledge, products, and solutions impacting society and indeed our every-day lives. In this context, an ever-increasing gap is emerging between the level of training achieved at the end of the high school program with respect to what it is required by today’s innovative companies and institutions. Concurrently, there has been an increasingly evident feature of the working model that has changed. Once a single individual was able to cover a wide range of activities featuring the innovation chain program. Today, a team of experts is needed to achieve the final target. This means that focused knowledge must therefore be integrated and shared, thanks to the development of transversal competencies supported by human skills. Furthermore, there is also the need to consider the team in a broad sense, allowing a way of working where all participants are aware of the importance of all roles and aspects of the program.

Experience:
Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research institution in Italy’s Province of Trento, in 2015 introduced a program into its area high schools to guide teachers and students through a realistic path to technology innovation, from research to market. The first project, “DomoSens”, simulated a company that develops a domotic product for air quality control, exploiting a state-of-the-art research result. To this purpose, the building blocks of the program structured in work packages and tasks have been identified: Communication, Legal Context, Commercial Plan, Sensor Chemistry, Electronics, Computer Science and Prototype Realization. The project, lasting 12-15 months, featured the participation of 13 classes belonging to 7 high schools (ca. 200 students), internal tutors and professional experts in specific sectors of the activities featuring the program.

Key goals include:
- Bring together many different disciplines and actors in real projects, enabling high-schools with different focuses to participate, learn, and experiment in team working and in the innovation process;
- Offer students a hands-on educational pathway that will make them more aware of the role of science in society;
- Foster independent working and learning, through critical thinking;
- Direct contact of teachers with professionals for a possible update about the state of the art of some specific topics.

FBK coordinated the project by organizing:
i) three plenary meetings;
ii) six progress meetings of the “contact team” comprising students from each class and
iii) ensuring the intervention of professionals to support the work of teachers.

Throughout the project there was the opportunity for reciprocal class visits to schools, allowing collaboration and information exchange.

Based on this successful experience, FBK registered the name DomoSens to bring emphasis to it as model to be implemented by others. It is anticipated that awareness of the DomoSens model will enable educators to develop their own multi-disciplinary programs, offering a new tool for younger generations to experience conscious innovation.
The model has been proposed other three times, allowing us to draw positive conclusions about the resilience of the model, and the impact it has had on students, teachers, and experts.

References:
[1] DomoSens: Modello integrato di scuola lavoro, FBK Press
[2] SenSAT: the New Generations in and Evolving Trentino, FBK Press

Keywords:

Work-based learning, innovation, high schools, team work, critical thinking.