On November 23rd, 2017 the opening event of the first SAP Next-Gen Lab in Spain took place at Liceu Politècnic, a school located in Rubí, Barcelona, that opened its doors only 5 years ago.

Finally, the SAP University Alliances & SAP Next-Gen team can add another country to their vast list of locations around the world with the inauguration of this new SAP Next-Gen Lab. Nevertheless, this Lab is not a regular Lab, since the students who work on the projects are between 13 and 16 years old. Despite their short age, they already count on a great experience developing innovative ideas, using methods such as design thinking and science fiction thinking, technological equipment like 3D printers, laser cutters, different types of sensors, Arduino, etc. and solutions such as Snap!, SAP Lumira, SAP Cloud Platform and much more.

The audience of this event was a combination of students, lecturers from different departments, the school direction and different industry partners (SAP customers and partners, start-up community and local industry).

 

                                                                                      Present for the attendees made with the laser cutter of the Lab

The event started at 5:00 pm with the cutting of the red ribbon by the school director, Montse Aimar, and the SAP Next-Gen country manager Spain, Isabel Hoffmann, followed by the welcome words of Luis Seguí, the legal responsible of Liceu Politècnic. Therewith, Miquel Carreras, director of the FabLab@School and the recently opened SAP Next-Gen Lab, shared his experience. His path with the school started in 2014, when Miquel decided to travel to California to visit the Stanford University in order to turn Liceu Politècnic into the first school part of FabLab@School in Europe. He then equipped the Lab with all the instruments and gadgets that could be useful for the students and developed the curriculum of the FabLab@School inspired on their hometown: Barcelona. Nowadays Liceu Politècnic has 2 international agreements and has completed around 50 projects, 4 of them with external participation of local industry.

 

 

After briefly introducing SAP University Alliances & Next-Gen and sharing some numbers and insights into other global SAP Next-Gen projects, three groups of students that are currently working on technological projects inside the Lab had the opportunity to share their prototypes and experiences of the past months. All three groups used the design thinking method for the ideation phase, worked with acoustic sensors and coded with Snap4Arduino. Some of the data was afterwards analysed using SAP Lumira.

 

 

The working group consisted of Aitana Martínez, Lara Pamias and Pol Morales opened the floor. These three students, aged 15 and 16, inspired their project on Apple. The function of the device they built is detecting relevant sounds within the home such as a crying baby, a boiling coffee machine or a too loud television. It was important for the students that their solution could be connected to other devices, such as the Apple HomePod, to improve the overall use and the user experience.

 

The second group that presented their project to the audience was the one integrated by Aitor de Moya, Alex Baldrich, Kike Abad and Gabi Lladó, aged 15. These students inspired their solution on the football team Bayern Munich, since they are all huge soccer fans and some of them had the opportunity to visit the SAP Inspiration Pavilion in Walldorf a few months ago. The objective of their device is to analyse the Bayern Munich fans during their games, based on the noise in the arena, e.g. which games had more support, in which moments or situations the fans supports less, etc.

 

 

Last but not least, Eric Montoliu, also 15, shared his work with us. In this case, his idea for the acoustic sensor device was based on the Google Home solution. Similar to the first working group, Eric pursuits to improve the sound quality at home and went even one step further during the design of his device. He integrated a servo motor that shows visually the grade of the sound through a pointer designed and built by himself.

 

 

The technical details of the three projects are:

Hardware:

– Micro-controller Arduino UNO

– Acoustic sensor

– LEDs

– Cables and resistors

Software:

– Snap4Arduino, to code the sensor

– Sketchup, to design the casing for the device in 3D

– Graphic Report, to analyze the data

The great dream of the students is to have the opportunity to present their prototypes to Apple, Bayern Munich and Google!

 

After the official opening event, we had the chance to network while tasting some selected regional products. The students were so highly motivated, that they went back to the lab to keep working on their projects and also filmed personal videos (in English and German) to introduce themselves and explain their motivation to visit Apple, Bayern Munich and Google. You can find these videos below.

 

 

A special Thank You to Montse AimarLuis Seguí and the rest of the Liceu Politècnic Team for their great support and open mindset, to Miquel Carreras, without whom this could never have been possible, and, of course, to the whole SAP Next-Gen Team!

 

Yours,

Isa Hoffmann