Young Thinkers and the Digital Future at SAP

daria_hert91 · ‎2018 Aug 22

Innovation Goes Digital in St. Ingbert (STI) -

Young Thinkers Take Over the Lead in our Digital SAP World

Video created by Oliver Pink

After the first successful event Innovation Day for Kids in 2017, we decided to extend our concept and set up the Young Thinkers Go Digital Day 2018. This meant having more young people with more ideas who bring even more fun!

Thanks to the great realization in the previous year, many volunteers came to support this year’s organization team managed by Jürgen Rink and Markus Welter. Together with our Young Thinkers partner schools we gathered and put our ideas into practice to make this special day in St. Ingbert unforgettable. Once again, the children and youngsters had the chance to discover and focus on innovative SAP-driven topics from TM product development such as Virtual and Augmented Reality.

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In addition to stages from last year such as the IoT Smart City presented by the STI Presales team and the IoT Store from STI Retail Consulting, who also showcased a new Fashion Tag scenario, our SAP partner Lenovo offered a brand new Jedi Challenge. But the young participants were also interested in our workshops such as 3D Printing & Modeling by STI d-Shop-Team, traffic light controlling with Calliope Mini offered by the STI Young Thinkers Initiative as well as VR/AR development with Unity performed by students from Walldorf. One of the highlights of all group works were Stefan Behrendt’s and Arno Meyer’s Design Thinking workshops on the topic “Design Your Future Schoolbag”. With the help of some Design Thinking coaches and a Customer Journey Map, the small groups worked independently and enthusiastically on the task to develop a concept of a schoolbag meeting the demands of a selected target group. The work was so much fun that all groups exceeded their time slots when presenting their extraordinarily creative results.

Design Thinkers Present their Concept of the "Schoolbag of the Future"

This year’s event was split into two parts. For the first part, we invited 60 students (aged from 12-18) and teachers from five local secondary schools: the Robert-Schuman-Gymnasium from Saarlouis, the Warndtgymnasium from Völklingen, the Gymnasium Ottweiler, the Helmholtz-Gymnasium Zweibrücken and the Gymnasium am Steinwald from Neunkirchen. Our guests had the possibility to try all stages and participate in the different workshops. Luckily, the STI organization team had help from the Young Thinkers Initiative and their User Assistance department, especially Miriam Boehnke. Besides, the two students Felix Waage und Fabio Westphal from Walldorf introduced the SAP dual university program to the students. Jörg Wagner, location head in STI, held a little closing speech before the students and teachers left.

In the afternoon our Digital Day continued with 60 SAP employees’ children and their friends who came to St. Ingbert to spend the rest of the day participating in the same stages and workshops that were offered in the morning. Now also volunteers, employees and other guests had the chance to prove their skills and knowledge. However, in most cases the younger generation beat the more experienced colleagues. Some external guests such as Kerstin Reese, representing the chair of didactics of computer science (Didaktik der Informatik) of Saarland University and the head of center for media education at the Institute for Education and Media (Medienbildung am LPM), Steffen Heßler, were invited by Christine Arend-Fuchs and enjoyed visiting our event. The concept and realization of the Young Thinkers Go Digital Day 2018 convinced our guests so much that Steffen Heßler spontaneously offered to donate 25 Calliopes to the SAP STI d-Shop team to be used for other events with young people.

Due to detailed planning and extensive preparation, everybody had a great day during which the participants had enough time to try everything they were interested in. Without the great number of volunteers and supporters this had been impossible, so a huge thanks to all SAP-internal sponsors, students from St. Ingbert and Walldorf and departments that were involved! Each one of you has proven that we can work together as SAP ONE TEAM across various locations and board areas. The participants’ positive feedback confirmed our success and therefore we are looking forward to the next event in our row!