Two Milestone students, Linda Kuhár (VII. Kerületi Madách Imre Gimnázium) and Dávid Papp (Kürt Alapítványi Secondary School) forming a team with Lili Názer (VII. Kerületi Madách Imre Gimnázium), have made it to the finals of EdisonKids Tournament, a fun challenge for students aged 12-18 with the goal of involving young students into creating innovative solutions for the problems present in our world. During the tournament, the participating groups need to find a solution for a chosen issue that affects at least 1000 people. There are four stages of the tournament. First, the students need to record a video in which they explain the problem they will focus on finding a solution for and state why their team will be the best for implementing it. Secondly, they participate in an online workshop about Design Thinking where – amongst others – they can get familiar with the modern methods of creative thinking and problem solving, which deem to be invaluable for planning their business model and creating their one-pager. Third, after this stage, the best eight teams enter into the final round, which is the period of implementing their ideas. Last but not least, in the final stage, the teams present their ideas in the form of an online presentation to the jury. Given that the challenge is supported by Samsung, the three best teams will win diverse Samsung products not only for themselves, but also for their mentors and schools.
Linda, Lili and Dávid have really enjoyed taking part in the competition so far and have already submitted their pitch video about their idea as well as their one-pager about their business plan with the help and support of their mentor, János Mészáros. Currently, they are in the third phase of the competition, where they are working on testing and implementing their idea before the final presentation for the jury takes place in the next coming weeks. This involves building a complex application (app) with a website while also creating a supply chain for their product. Although this requires a lot of energy and work, all of the team members are optimistic and ambitious for what to come. During this competition, the students can utilise their already acquired experience and knowledge from Milestone Institute, while also further strengthening their critical and analytical thinking, creativity and teamworking skills.
As Dávid has told us: “We worked on our business plan almost every night for two weeks. It was tiring but now, we know that it is absolutely worth it.”
Lili has a similar attitude towards this: “We had long meetings every night for two weeks, which was tiring, but also exciting and fun.”
Luckily, each of the students have experience in different fields, so it was easy to distribute tasks, come up with great ideas and work as a diverse team. Namely, Lili was responsible for writing the one-pager for which Linda did the research and Dávid took care of the design.
The students are passionately working towards the final stage of the competition, because as Linda has told us: “I find it a great opportunity to create something that can help people, and I am also happy to see that we, students, have a chance to create something new and voice our ideas.”
We congratulate them for their extraordinary achievement and wish them luck for the last stage of the competition!