This year, Alt jumped into AdoptIdee for the first time. AdoptIdee is a foundation that brings education and business together, connecting primary school kids from grades 4, 5, and 6 with innovative tech and IT companies in the northern Netherlands. The goal? To get these young minds buzzing about a future career in IT and tech.
When we signed up, we learned something fascinating from AdoptIdee. Professor Dr. Paul Iske from Universiteit Maastricht introduced the term ‘creativity index’ in 2005. His research says people between 35 and 50 are the least creative, and by age 44, they’re diagnosed with “Terminal Seriousness.” Yikes!
Naturally, our 44-year-old colleagues Bertran and Hugo were a bit triggered. We admit it, our office humor is heavy on the dad jokes. They dove into brainstorming mode for suitable problem statements for our company. We were curious about the ideas from kids in grades 4, 5, and 6, so our first question was: What keys do you feel are missing on your current keyboards? It was a broad question to see how they’d think about it. But, it missed the mark on focusing on assistive technology, which is our current jam.
In the end, we chose a more challenging question: “How can we adjust a keyboard so that you know where your fingers are without looking?” We wanted to raise awareness about visual impairments and how to include people with disabilities in society through smart product design.
We teamed up with the students of Josef Haydn School in Helpman, Groningen. After briefing them, we saw lots of interest—some more than others, but overall, they were pretty intrigued, which was lovely to see.
Pitches
A few weeks later, Bertran visited the school to hear their pitches. He said, “I loved working with each group project, listening to their ideas, and talking about people with visual impairments. The children brainstormed without limits. One idea mentions temperature differences or sound to indicate the location of keys. From my studies, I’ve learned not to immediately reject new ideas because that kills creativity. I really wanted to say ‘no,’ but I held back!”
As keyboard experts, we quickly saw the production challenges in their ideas. But their out-of-the-box thinking was inspiring. We encouraged them to think even further and come up with solutions. If we had the freedom, we would love to build a prototype to see how it works.
The Final Day at Martiniplaza, Groningen
On May 15th, the kids presented their ideas at our booth in Martiniplaza, Groningen. With a pre-show by TikTok Tammo, the excitement was through the roof. The students brought detailed prototypes and posters to pitch their concepts. We were amazed by their involvement and dedication. A great idea was giving keycaps different shapes and making extra pathfinders with various shapes—something actually doable with mechanical keyboards.
It was a fun and successful project. We learned a lot and believe it’s crucial to motivate students to think critically about challenging problems. Creative ideas and solutions can take you far. Plus, we learned to occasionally set aside our “Terminal Seriousness.”
