My kids go to a democratic school. One of the things I love so much with this educational approach is the concept that you learn from everything you do. You learn in class, but you also learn when you collect leaves in the yard, prepare decorations for a school play or interact and play with your classmates in between classes. Learning outside of the class teaches kids more than just new facts; they get ideas and get innovative. For example - fixing the swing in the yard with very limited resources, or building some challenging structures with mud. And you know what else? They get inspired. Inspired from their friends, from the world around them and from the need to find solutions to problems they face.
This is true also for grownups. We learn from everything we do and experience, and at SAP, our D-Shop exposes you to this kind of learning. D-Shop gives you the opportunity to learn by experimenting with new technologies, to innovate and to get inspired. This inspiration is not limited to D-Shop activities; it will eventually affect your daily work, bringing innovation to the products you work on, or improving your code, your group processes and more. And who knows? It might even inspire you to invent the next big thing. J
Last week we held SAP’s very first D-Shop week here at SAP Labs Israel. It was exciting to say the least.
The week was full with interesting sessions and workshops, and, as part of the D-Shop team, I had the privilege of taking part in most of them.
While there too many sessions to mention in this post, I’ll single out two for special mention: "Open Your Mind With Brainwave Reader", which I attended, and the "WWW - Wearables Workshop for Women," which I led together with Shir Hornstein.
In "Open Your Mind with Brainwave Reader" I got the chance to hear Ido Fishler's excellent lecture on how technology changes the way we interact with each other, and then to learn about the brainwave reader Emotiv from Tal Haviv and Dror Last. We also had a short Demo where Paola Laufer managed to lift a cube with the power of her mind J. You’re welcome to try the magic yourselves @D-Shop.
In the wearables workshop we worked with Adafruit's FLORA to create wearables. Though we had some technical blockers and time was short, we got some cool prototypes, and I do believe everyone had fun and got inspired. (One group even took the FLORA "home" to complete their project!)
The wearables workshop was dedicated to women since we wanted to encourage more women to take part in D-Shop activities. Percentages of women participating in such activities has been traditionally low, and I believe it's not because they are not interested. A women-only forum is usually a place in which women feel more comfortable to learn new things, and ask questions, and though it might sound surprising to some of you, this is true also for women in R&D, academia and management. Here are two interesting articles on this subject: "Women and Men in the Classroom: Inequality and Its Remedies", and "The Confidence Gap".
The women-only forum concept definitely proved itself during D-Shop week – the wearables workshop was full, and the percentage of women as a total of all who participated was around 38%.
I am really proud of what we were able to accomplish last week.
Looking forward to D-Shop week 2017 J
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