At the 5th edition of Lift with Fing in Marseille we organized for the first time a “Lift Youth”-format, welcoming over 200 teenagers from France and Switzerland. To entertain the teenagers we asked four speakers to come up with a “Youth-version” of their Lift with Fing talk: “Maker movement” experts Véronique Routin (Fing) and Marie-Noéline Viguié (Nod-a), Coding-teacher Frédéric Bardeau and Inria research director Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, did a fantastic job!
It took the teens some time to get started in the Q&A session, but once going they asked Pierre-Yves a lot of questions about how to do research and make robots. Robots really seem to be a hot topic also for teenagers. One question that was quite surprising was a young man asking “what code is”. It was a great reminder for us at Lift to remember that there is world out there, outside our innovation bubble…
The presentations were followed by visits of the Lift Experience exhibiton curated by “Design the Future Now”, where the teens get their hands dirt and test prototypes.
This first edition of Lift Youth was an outstanding experience and we shall repeat it very quickly! Little beats the energy of youth..
