The International Week 2017 of Almere was organised by the lead of Windesheim in co-operation with Aeres in order to increase awareness of the first year students about sustainability. The four day long English event had five major topics for discussion: Feeding the city, Almere is healthy, Almere gives energy, Almere goes green, Zero-waste Almere.
Each student could choose the topic he wants to prepare assignments about. Afterwards each person were assigned to a group of 6-10 people. On Monday there were presentations about each topic at Utopolis. For each presentation a professional was invited from the local municipality in order to provide up-to-date information to the students. As a reward everyone could stay and watch a movie at the cinema, which was really enjoyed by the students.
The real hard work started on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Alnovum building. Every team received a task according to his topic to work on. For example the zero-waste teams had to find solutions for eliminating the food-waste of their school, the Almere gives energy teams had to come up with ideas for an educational centre about upcycling and recycling. The approximate 360 participants were supervised by 5 international seniors from our school. We have received excellent feedbacks about them as they were not only able to help with the assignments because of their study, but they also motivated the teams for better work and kept the atmosphere cheerful. During the work sections the students also visited further presentations about different topics such as Big Data Value Center or Food systems in transition which were represented by our students and lecturers from Wageningen University.
It was not enough to come up with some essays, the competitors had to make a short movie about their work and ideas. The best teams of each topic won a trip to the beautiful Transylvania and they even could visit Dracula’s Castle!