The teacher shows the company representatives a children's project

Jelena Janković, product manager of Amplitudo Academy, shares her story of how national competition in Montenegro inspired her company to work more closely with school children and their teachers and help them pitch their projects and learn new skills necessary for the 21st century. Amplitudo is a software, mobile app company that also works in design and marketing. The company's strategy is to create innovative products that solve practical problems and turn those products into startups. 

"We also have a startup team specialized for competition presentation. At the national competition, we realized that the biggest problem those amazing children have is the presentation of their projects so we offered to help them improve their project presentations for regional competition and in a way commercialize them a bit.

The national competition was an amazing experience for us. It was so fulfilling and touching and motivating to see a room with 50 children who made such innovative projects without previous experience or knowledge and who were so eager to present them.

We saw some amazing projects - students from one elementary school designed an automated school since in their school students ring the bell at the beginning and end of each class. It was so great to see how they used microbit to solve a practical problem.

 That shows us that we have potential innovators and entrepreneurs who will be very creative and innovative in their future work!"

Children presenting their project at Amplitudo company

In order for children to fulfill their potential, Amplitudo worked with two schools in preparations for regional competition – Elementary school “21. maj” and “Vladimir Nazor”. 

"With "21.May" we helped them write a presentation, pitch their project and connected them with Open box company that will donate the prototype of microbit device designed for special needs children who will now, not only learn to count but also learn to recognize colors and shapes. "Vladimir Nazor" school has a more developed project, as the entire school participated in creating it, so we are helping them with presentation and pitching.

Our goal is to connect schools with real companies and thus show the endless possibilities of the IT sector. The biggest problem high school students have is lack of practice so we created workshops for them while elementary school children have workshops that motivate them to learn a new set of skills in design and programming. We also organized an Academy for teachers to help them learn more about microbit programming."

We cannot praise enough British Council's Schools for the 21st-century initiative as it helps the development of skills that are not so common in Montenegrin education - such as critical thinking, logic. Microbit devices, which are part of the initiative, motivated schoolchildren to work on real projects and implement what they learned in school on actual, "real" problems. 
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