Tec Labs once again was an active member of the ULisses Challenge 2024, a UNITE! program designed to foster innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration among students of different nationalities to tackle ocean sustainability problems. As part of the challenge, Tec Labs facilitated a series of dynamic workshops and interactive sessions aimed at enhancing creativity, teamwork, and strategic thinking.
The journey began with an intensive team building and design thinking workshops. The primary objective was to strengthen intra-team relationships and hone problem-solving skills. Participants were immersed in activities that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking and collaborative solutions. By leveraging the principles of design thinking, the Tec Labs team was able to redefine traditional approaches to challenges, ensuring that their solutions are both innovative and user-centric.
This years teams were called upon to address three complex and challenging goals, namely to characterize the spatial extent of the pollution-related event; quantify the biological impacts in the surrounding food-webs and find solutions to remove the plastic nurdles from the surrounding waters and coastlines.
As we further delved into the program, Tec Labs was present in project check-up sessions aimed at providing insights into the teams creative process towards finding solutions for each proposed goal – especially, the third goal and its inherent innovative process.
Moreover, a stakeholder session was also promoted by Tec Labs, which invited six professionals to ensure that the ULisses teams had access to expert feedback and invaluable advice concerning the three challenges they had to assess in this year’s edition.
At the beginning of the final week of the program, the Tec Labs team was once again present, this time to facilitate a science communication and pitching workshop. Participants were engaged in activities that fostered creative pitching and effective communication. By utilizing interactive quizzes and a dynamic pitch roulette, the workshop was designed to refine science communication skills and enhance pitching techniques. The Tec Labs team successfully conducted this workshop, ensuring that the developed solutions were both engaging and impactful.
And all these weeks of hard work culminated in the final presentation session that took place at ULisboa’s Incubator on Friday 26th, with teams presenting their incredibly innovative solutions. These ranged from hydrogels that acted as a “glue” to capture nurdles at the ocean to self-driven catamarans that filtered the waters at the Ross Sea. In the end, all teams were praised for their hard work and a winning team was chosen by the jury, which was not an easy task considering all teams conducted outstanding works.
Thus ends another edition of ULisses! Knowledge was spread, innovative mindsets were fostered, bonds were created, and most importantly, a group of young people were gathered towards one common goal: to make the world a better place. We can’t wait for the next edition!
