TEDxKids in English

The post's goal is to give at least a small background of what we are doing here  :)

Probably everyone know what is TED, if not, go ahead and check the link. Shortly: small non-profit organization which, as they say, is "devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading".

Aside from TED there is TEDx, which are independently organized events, there are many kinds of them: TEDxWomen, TEDxYouth, and so on. Every city and organization can have it's own TEDx. We are doing internships at TEDxBrussels, which is the biggest TEDx event. The curator of TEDxBrussels is Walter De Brouwer, who is also our supervisor. The organization is at the same office as One Laptop Per Child Europe, another worldwide known non-profit (lead by Walter as well).

There are around the same 10 people working on both organizations events (only 2 Belgians, others are from UK, US, Hungary, Sweden, Congo... :) It's real fun and awesome experience to be among such people and to know how work gets done (about which we only read before). We've already had a chance to touch cool OLPC computers, there are already 1 mln. of them distributed in different countries.

To be more concrete, we're working on another TEDx event: TEDxKids (organized by TEDxBrussels). The first idea of such project's beginning was given by sir Ken Robinson in his already famous TED talk Schools kill creativity, and it is necessary to make education system's revolution in order to change it. So TEDxBrussels determined to do it! Shortly about the conference:

• June 1, 2011, Brussels
• Concept: 6 years of knowledge in 1 day (organizers already admitted that it's impossible to do, but it's possible to start a change)
• Participants: selected 49 kids (10 year old), native English speaking. Kids will have to send videos with answered questions, videos will be placed in youtube, and other kids will select the ones who will go to the conference
• Kids will be divided into 7 groups and will work with different professionals of different fields (don't know the final concept yet, will write more later when it's clear)
• At the same time there will be 300 observers (adults) watching the kids from another "room". There will be also different speakers giving talks for them (sir Ken Robinson, Jamie Oliver, TED Europe president, and others.
• The conference will be simulcasted to other 1500 international schools, so around 1000 000 children will be able to see what's going on in Brussels. Pretty awesome :)

We're really excited about working here! And doing all the best we can! The first task we got is to come up with the new curriculum for primary education. So what we do now is basically getting deeper background of what it is now, and the brainstorming what's wrong and how it could be changed, or maybe some things are not necessary at all. It's very hard to picture the final picture, but we are going to it :)