Traveling 1500 kilometers to educate youth? Not a problem for us!

Hello, my name is Almedin Beganović and I am the first-year student of Information Technology at International Burch University in Sarajevo. During the last month my team and I traveled over 1500km all around BIH to educate youth about 3D printing and 3D modeling, but also to teach them to apply gained knowledge on solving problems.  Workshops were held in 5 cities, with 5 hosts and partners: Tuzla – DKR (German center for robotics), Srebrenica – Futures Makerspace, Sarajevo – International Burch University, Banja Luka – QLab (JS Guru) & Mostar – SPARK.

Main slogan of the event was “Ne sudi po brimu” which means “Don’t judge by brim”, and for us and participants it meant a lot. Well, the brim is actually the first layer of plastics which is printed around the model and usually turns out really bad but it gives you time to fix things before printing of a model starts. However, the fact is that people who don’t like to fix things just stop printing and quit. But since we’ve focused on problem solving and gaining knowledge about 3D printing, this analogy was just perfect. I believe it can also serve as good analogy for every young person who want to leave Bosnia and Herzegovina, because they should at least try to fix something before they leave or quit.  

Every workshop surprised us in different way, because we’ve encountered situations where some participants traveled over 160km in order to attend our workshop. Also, also we had some funny situations, like the one when we had to travel with 3D printer with train…

Partners on this project were our beloved BH Futures Foundation, ASUBIH (Association of high school students in BiH), International Burch University, along with our hosts/partners: DKR, JS Guru and SPARK. Whole event was a part of EU Code week, within Meet and Code initiative, which was financially supported by TechSoup Balkans.

Until the next year… Don’t judge by brim!