Nearly a thousand girls and boys from Girona and Salt today (5 June) reinvented their cities. The schoolchildren were taking part in the first edition of the Festival of Ideas, organised by the Fundació per a la Creativació and the Prince of Girona Foundation, as an activity taking place in parallel with the IMPULSA Forum. The children’s proposals will be passed on to the mayors of Girona and Salt.
The Festival of Ideas served to bring to a close the programme of creativity which the children in their 3rd and 4th years of primary school education in Girona, Salt and Aiguaviva schools had been working on during this school year. In this final workshop the children became Inventors and carried out various activities in order to think, reflect and make proposals about the challenges facing their cities.
The General Manager of the Fundació per a la Creativació, Miquel Àngel Oliva, stressed that “the children turned themselves into Inventors. And as any inventor would do, they firstly dreamed about how they would like their city to be. They then went on to examine a problem of the city and proposed a “problem sorting” machine to put it right, identifying a place in the city which they would like to improve. They thought about how to do it so that the citizens would be better people, and finally they made proposals to help the most disadvantaged people. With all their proposals they built a city of ideas and unleashed a downpour of ideas by releasing balloons”.
The activities of the Festival of Ideas started by welcoming all those present. After developing the attitudes of all inventors (researching, dreaming, testing, exploring, feeling excitement, intuiting, sharing and innovating), the children taking part were given bracelets accrediting them as Inventors. Miquel Àngel Oliva, General Manager of the Fundació per a la Creativació, noted that “with this bracelet, the children have the super-powers of inventors to find imaginative solutions and to rise to any challenge”.
Once the Festival of Ideas comes to a close, the pupils taking part will work on their proposals back in the classroom, where they will share them with their schoolmates and make a choice of the best proposals to improve their city. Those ideas will be set out in a letter in which the children will explain what they would like their city to be like, what problems they think it has, what they would do to solve them and what they would do to help others. The letters will then be presented to the city councils of their respective cities.
The Executive Director of IMPULSA Forum, Salvador Maneu, explained that “the Festival of Ideas forms part of the series of activities leading up to the IMPULSA Forum, tackling critical aspects that affect the development of the children and young people: education, work, the fostering of vocations and talent, and incentivation of the creative and entrepreneurial spirit in all its dimensions”.
Fostering creativity
More than a thousand children from schools in Girona, Salt and Aiguaviva have taken part during this school year in a programme to discover and experience their creative capacity.
The programme poses various challenges that the children have to analyse in order to generate ideas and resolve them in the most satisfactory way possible by following the phases of any creative process. Initially, they are presented with an imaginary challenge set by a personality, and they are invited to create their own stories through a game, to reinvent a real product (in this edition it was a yogurt) and finally to offer solutions for improving their city.
The Programme of Creativity of the Fundació per a la Creativació® is carried out in schools in Girona (Col·legi Verd, Bosc de la Pabordia, Sagrada Família, Escola Pericot, Bell-lloc del Pla, Fedac Sant Narcís and Marta Mata), Salt (Fedac Salt – Dominiques, La Massana, Silvestre Santaló, El Pla, Les Deveses, El Gegant del Rec and La Farga) and Aiguaviva (Vilademany).
The Festival of Ideas also had the participation of pupils from Girona’s Carme Auguet school, who took part in a programme designed by UdiGital of the University of Girona.
The organising entities
The Fundació per a la Creativació was set up with the objective of acting in the educational sphere to develop and disseminate creativity in order to turn it into innovation for the main purpose of “giving the new generations the necessary competences to contribute towards the future changes in our society as well as towards their own personal self-realisation”.
For its part, the Prince of Girona Foundation has the objective of supporting young people in order to boost their capacity for constructing a better and more solidary society, paying special attention to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is along those lines that the Foundation aspires to become a reference for promoting talent through projects in which young people of all ages and backgrounds play a leading role. Its activity focuses on four lines of action: promoting entrepreneurial spirit, success at school, improving employability and job placement and encouraging vocations and talent.
