Team name: Provolosi
Team members: Simone Degiacomi, Lorenzo Framba, Sergio Facchini, Sebastiano Castellan
Challenge: Innovative learning beyond Covid
Challenge host: University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Challenge theme: Learning Spaces and Pedagogies

Solution description: 
As students during the global pandemic, we find it very hard to apply what we arelearning. This is particularly true for practical skills, which now are taught in plain frontal lessons. Without laboratories during which we could apply these skills, we feel that we learn very little. While practice could help students to better understand the concepts of theoretical lessons, labs are locked during the COVID-19 period.

During the Hackathon we've built an online collaboration platform to solve this issue: we designed Squiddy, an online collaboration platform - a digital lab, aiming to facilitate the development of practical skills during remote learning.

The aim of the solution is to allow students to actively participate in digital labs and to help teachers in the process of overcoming the challenges of physical distancing. In particular, students will have the opportunity to build mental models of concepts they are studying by using virtual environment similar to the one normally used in the classroom. On the teachers’ side, they will be able to choose an online lab from those suggested by the platform, or alternatively use another webpage as an example. They can then group the students into teams, define the goals to be achieved during the session and invite the students to work together. Students will also have access to a shared web page where they can collaborate, interact on each other’s screen and communicate through video calls.

The platform would allow simultaneous communication and collaboration, thus making distance learning more engaging and motivating. Read the full description of the solution here