Partnership with the Municipal Department of Education will equip the new Technological Experimental Gymnasium
Rio de Janeiro inaugurated, on March 23, the new Elza Soares Municipal School, which has its first Technological Experimental Gymnasium (or GET), focused on the use of technology in education and which applies a teaching method that encourages students to trace your learning journey.
“We are inaugurating the most innovative public school in the country”, stated the municipal secretary of Rio de Janeiro, Renan Ferreirinha, at the inauguration ceremony. “GETs are centered on the STEAM methodology, which brings together different areas of knowledge, and places the student as the protagonist of their educational process. We need to innovate in education, and GET inaugurates this stage in our network.”
Supporting this initiative, iFood invested in the purchase of equipment and furniture that will be used to equip three rooms in three schools with technologies that support projects developed by students, such as 3D printers and tools that encourage culture maker, in which students learn by getting their hands dirty.
“GETs are spaces where students have contact with technology and activities that stimulate logical reasoning and computational thinking. We know that there is a challenge in the public network to equip schools, which is why we want to contribute to accelerating initiatives that awaken young people's interest in technology and prepare them for the professions of the future”, comments Luanna Luna, social impact manager at iFood.
This will be the first Gym focused on the use of technology, and will initially serve 200 elementary school students. In this new model, teaching content is approached based on real needs, experienced and brought forward by students in a collaborative way.
The forecast of the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Education is to implement GETs in 22 public schools in the city and benefit 297 thousand people by 2024, including high school students and teachers.
“Rio has an ambitious project to create more GETs, which will serve as support for the networks and communities that surround these gyms”, comments Luanna. “As the city has the largest number of elementary schools in Brazil, we understand that this would be an investment that could have a great impact.”
iFood's commitment to education
The department's initiative is part of the Education for the 21st Century project, which seeks to develop new formats and curricula in STEAM (acronym in English for the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics).
The Experimental Gymnasiums were created in Rio de Janeiro in 2011 to encourage young people to choose the educational path best suited to their skills and the life project they are building with a view to developing their potential.
The investment in Technological Experimental Gymnasiums is aligned with the iFood commitment to impact, by 2025, 5 million students and teachers in the public school system, encouraging access and use of technology in basic education.
An example is the program My High School Diploma, which offered delivery partners 2,000 scholarships to take the preparatory course for the National Examination for Certification of Skills for Young People and Adults (Encceja) in 2022 and receive a certificate of completion of Primary or Secondary Education.
Another is the support to the 1Bi Foundation for the development of AprendiZAP, a free tutoring tool on WhatsApp that has already been used by around 300,000 students and teachers (also available to delivery drivers).
