C4C – Como for Children Design Competion

The Chamber of Commerce of Como, in occasion of the IDC 2009 conference, has promoted a special competition calling for proposals on a “technology-enhanced” pre-school environment: the Como 4 Children (C4C) competition. C4C is an initiative to promote a strong innovation of the approach to education for young children (3-10 years of age). The competition’s goal is to “imagine a pre-school of the (near or remote) future, where the physical space is enhanced with (existing or future) technologies and children can naturally intermix, at individual or social level, ‘traditional’ playing and learning activities with interaction based on modern technologies of all kinds”. The competition has two tracks: Vision of the interactive pre-school of the future and Interaction at pre-school. 35 creative, visionary and compelling proposal were submitted from all over the world, by designers, interaction designers, computer scientists and architects. The conference chairs together with a panel of experts from the Chamber of Commerce of Como, after a careful analysis have selected the best 3 proposals for each track. The top 3 winners for Track 1 are from Stanford University, USA, a collaborative proposal between Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, and another proposal from ASP-Politecnico Milano, Turkey. Petimo was named as a winner in Track 2. Besides Petimo, the other 2 selected top 3 winners are proposals from MIT Media Lab, USA and University of Iowa, USA. We gave a presentation about Petimo in a special session during the IDC 2009 conference. After the presentation, we receive many positive feedback about the project. One of the Italian speaking panelist gave his thumbs-up immediately upon the completion of our presentation. The distinguished panelists were very impressed at the high quality of the project, its vision and implementation within a short time frame.