Susanna Tesconi
Educational designer and researcher, her work is inspired by the interaction between children and technology.
After getting a degree in Philosophy of Language she became a primary school teacher.
During her teaching practice, she started observing the interaction between kids and technological devices and decided to improve her technological expertise, being her goal to engage groups of children in developing their own technologies. She got a Postgraduate in interaction design and she discovered the universe of open hardware, programming and digital fabrication. She completed the training with the Fab Academy Programme at fabLAB Barcelona where she started in 2009 an after-school informal program with a little group of children.
In 2012, during a residence at LABoral Art Center, in Gijón, Asturias she worked with a small group of teachers creating educational kits and activities for k12.
This was the starting point for an experimental programme in school dropout prevention (organized by LABoral and the Ministry of Education), that uses, among others things, design and digital fabrication in order to improve the motivation of public high school students and promote a methodological change in teachers. Beside her educational task she's getting a Master Degree in Research in Education a UAB Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona as starting point of a PHd program. Also she is part of the fablearn fellowship, promoted byTransformative Learning Technologies Lab at Stanford University a cohort of teachers and educators with the resources to transform their own successful education activities and experiences in Makerspaces and Fablabs into shareable, open source educational materials.
