Good life for children and adolescents
Good life for children and adolescents is a project of The European Social Fund. The central aim of this project is to develop education in university of applied sciences to be more workplace-oriented.
The main idea is project's multidisciplinary development teams. With the help of the operating model to be created during the project, students and lecturers will become networked with employer organisations in the region, identify challenges arising from daily life, and try to solve them in close cooperation with the organisations. The model to be developed will increase the students' abilities to carry out networked teamwork and to develop innovative work methods.
During the project, a new operating model will be created for transferring from traditional subject-specific teaching to learning by developing in teams. The teams will consist of participating students and lecturers from relevant fields of study, as well as representatives of employer organisations. In the pilot project, development teams will be built around employer organisations in Central and Northern Uusimaa that support better lives for children. The preliminary plan for the development teams is to have teams of school-aged and pre-school-aged children and adolescents.
One concrete way of approaching the project's main objective - making the university of applied sciences more relevant to the world of work - is to develop tools and work methods to support the participating employer organisations. At the initial stages of the project, the higher education students will gather data on the everyday challenges met in employer organisations, through interviews and observation. The challenges will be mapped and evaluated. At the next stage, the students will produce tools and work methods for solving the challenges. The tools and methods created during the process will be productised at least to prototype level; in the case of the best innovations, the process will continue, for instance in the form of theses.
