Solve for Tomorrow

A groundbreaking, wide-scope project implemented by deserving high-school students from across Romania

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 03.10.2023, 14:00

Attention-grabbing, as of late, has been Solve for Tomorrow, a competition
focusing on involvement, determination, education responsibility, but also on the
future high school students from across Romania, youngsters aged 16 to 18, try
to build today, from one idea to the next. The competition has now reached its
third edition, so it does have a tradition of its own, reason enough for us to speak
with the representatives of the winning teams in 2022.

Two high-school students with Bucharest’s Tudor Vianu National
College, Cosmina Ene and Sânziana Grecu of the SurvEco team, 3rd placed
at the end of the 3rd edition of the Solve for Tomorrow in 2022 told
us the following.

Cosmina Ene:

We’re members of SurvEco, a team that came in 3rd
as part of the 2nd edition of Solve for Tomorrow. Our project
consisted in an autonomous drone using Artificial Intelligence, which overflies
Bucharest and its outskirts, with the purpose of detecting illegal waste and
its burning, because pollution in Bucharest is mainly caused by such illegal waste
deposits.

Sânziana Grecu:

For us, the competition translated into a personal development
process and opened up many paths for us, because we met people with whom we
collaborated and to whom we wouldn’t have had access, normally.

Cosmina Ene:

We recommend all pupils who
want to have fantastic experience ant who want to surpass themselves to
participate in this year’s edition of the competition.

The Solve for Tomorrow national competition organized by Samsung
Electronics Romania in partnership with Junior Achievement Romania designated
its winners based on the marks given by an interdisciplinary judging panel.

Spacemind Kingdom, the team that came in 2nd , is made of
three girls coordinated by a teacher with of the Jacques M. Elias Techological
High School in Sascut, Aurelia Dascalu. Here is what one of the pupils, Andreea, told us.

As part of the Solve for Tomorrow’s previous
edition we won the 2nd prize with an educational application
dedicated to women teenagers. We created a game by means of which they can
develop their abilities and knowledge about the STEM system. Apart from this
game, we also had a section enabling the girls to speak to personalities that
had a strong bearing on these areas, through Artificial Intelligence. We started
off from the idea that we need to encourage teenagers to encourage to work in
this field despite the stereotypes that have been created. The competition
helped us learn about design thinking, a concept that enabled us to develop the
idea we started from, to a greater extent, we managed to discover ourselves, we
developed new abilities, but, over and above anything else, we opened new
horizons towards technology and towards what we really want to become.

The 1st Prize went to The Green Team of the Eudoxiu
Hurmuzachi National College in Rădăuți. The team developed the prototype of a
hydroponic farming system that enables the cultivation of plants in a nutrients
bed and an addition of vegetable oil that slow down water evaluation.

Here is team leader Cosmin:

Our purpose is that, in the future, we
should practice farming according to hydroponic systems on an industrial scale.
We still study the domain, one prototype after the next, but the way seems promising.
We wouldn’t have reached this point had we not participated in the Solve for
Tomorrow competition. As part of the competition, we met entrepreneurs of
various walks of life who offered us their pieces of advice and guided us and we
participated in design-thinking sessions. We recommend each and every youngster
who has an idea to participate.

Head of Communications Samsung Romania, Sabina Ştirb, told us the
following:

Solve for Tomorrow is a project Samsung
Electronics Romania holds most dear, its third edition is launched today. It
has collected more than 600 projects so far, from all over the country. Also,
there is the global version of the Solve for Tomorrow, a project that took off
13 years ago and in which 1.8 million pupils got involved, globally. Yet, apart
from those figures, we mainly celebrate today are by all means pupils and
teachers, mentors who work with the ideas that were registered for the
competition.

Here is what Junior Achievement Romania Educational director, Loredana Poenaru,
told us:

It is a project
that dares pupils to put together their technology, education and creativity,
so that they can develop solutions for the problems in communities, be they environment-related
issues or educational circumstances that can be improved., education-wise, as regards
long-lasting development, all these are domains children can consider if they
want to develop their ideas. We’re now in the third edition. So far, we’ve had
600 ideas that were registered in the previous editions, for each edition the
second stage means selecting 25 of the best ideas that have been going through
a development process, with design thinking underlying it, at once enabling
youngsters to develop their ideas up to the stage of prototype, and further inviting
them to consider the possibility of implementing those ideas. Apart from design thinking they get in touch with entrepreneurs,
they can also learn how to give their ideas an entrepreneurial direction, they
go through mentoring sessions and that is how things thus reach a feasible
stage. At the end of the competition youngsters are attached to the projects they
have been working on for so many months, so in the ensuing phases they should develop
the need to take their projects further, to the implementation stage.

The third edition of Solve for Tomorrow has kicked off already!