The Austrian-Indonesian Society (AIS), together with the Indonesian Student Association in Austria (PPI-Austria), successfully organized the Head in the Clouds (HITC) workshop on Saturday, 28th September 2019, which took place in the Zemanek Seminar Room of TU Wien.
Unlike typical AIS events which usually focus on adult audiences, this event was dedicated to children at the age of 6-12 years old focusing on informal and extracurricular education activity, which is a first of its kind.
Acted as the workshop instructor was Ms. Niina Novak (AIT, formerly at TU Wien) who introduced the HITC to children of AIS families in Vienna. At the heart of the workshop is the “Self-Organised Learning Environment” concept or SOLE, aiming to improve children’s learning experience dealing with future-oriented and education-relevant topics such as computational thinking, programming skills, mentoring, robotics, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork and capacity building.
According to Ms. Niina, who adapted her approach in this AIS workshop from her successful European ERASMUS Project, SOLE itself is a new education method that encourages children to learn many daily aspects by stimulating any possible solutions to some specific problems.
The HITC approach has been implemented and evaluated to foster educations in countries like Austria, Kosovo, Rumania. Recently, a pilot implementation of the approach was also introduced using similar settings in Bandung (West Java) and Del (Northern Sumatra) in Indonesia.
In our HITC Workshop, for the first time, the children of AIS communities who resides in Vienna had a great opportunity to enjoy the highly stimulated HITC workshop. Twenty-five children actively participated in the workshop between 13.00–15.00. Indonesian students representing PPI-Austria also took a significant role as supporting trainers who interacted with the children using three different languages; English, German and Bahasa.
The workshop received very positive appreciations from both participated children and their parents and was anticipated to be one of the more frequent programs from AIS in the future. This workshop was also aimed to transfer the essential knowledge on SOLE and HITC from Ms. Novak to the AIS community as an effort to disseminate the HITC approach in a wider setting.