After Naples, the courses of the Apple Academy also arrive in Palermo

2023 is the European Year of Skills. Fundamental for face a future that keeps changing faster than at any time in our history. But how are skills built? What does it take to start the spark that ignites digital transformation?

In Naples, a special recipe was put together, which unites the Federico II University, the city and the Regiondozens of non-governmental organizations and universities and even Apple, the global technology giant that has recently exceeded 3 trillion dollars in capitalization, the first company in the history of world business to be worth more than Italy’s (or France’s) GDP. .

“It’s like the pizza recipe,” she said Giorgio Ventre, director of the Apple Developer Academy in Naples, born in 2016 from the collaboration between the Federico II University and the Cupertino company. It’s a joke but up to a certain point: the American giants always talk about the secret recipe of their success. And in this case we can honor the merit of a city that has been able to invent many successes in its centuries-old history, not just culinary ones. But this secret recipe is the admission that behind a project training and transfer of skills there is something different from the usual bureaucracy of educational programs or the traditional face-to-face training approach.

The Apple Academy of Naples, which has just graduated with the ceremony of June 30 another 300 students out of a total of about 2,000 from 60 different countries, it is the classic good news that risks not being read. Yet, to measure concrete hope in the future, it is more important than so much bad news that unfortunately fills the pages of newspapers all over the world every day.

Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president and Tim Cook’s right hand for the environment and social initiatives, after having also been for the Obama presidency, she is the manager and proud mother of the first Academy created by Apple and still the only one in Europe: “We need Naples” , he said during his speech to students who have finished the one-year institutional path of the Academy or the advanced one of the Pier. And she announced the novelty of a second center in Palermo, where an activity dedicated only to the relationship between students and foundations will be carried out for the first time. That of NGOs, non-governmental organizations as partners to help students grow is one of the unpublished but not secret ingredients, born in Naples and which has become one of the main flavors of the Academy recipe. Of all the Apple Academy in the world. As Jackson later explained to us in a brief meeting on the sidelines of the ceremony, “the foundation program was born here, but now we use it all over the world”.

So off to the intensive courses of a few weeks or a few months, which allow girls and boys to enter the logic of computational thinking, learning new ways to create innovation and value but also learning to work together, being creative, presenting ideas clearly, learning to accept the proposals of others and to expose their own to let them be enriched by the group. In the world, the Foundation program sees more than 25,000 students every year, while in Italy, thanks to the collaboration with 6 universities (Parthenope, Suor Orsola Benincasa, Orientale, Sannio, Capodimonte and Federico II) it is making several hundreds pass each year. With the opening of the Palermo pole, announced by Jackson, they will become more than 900 in our country alone.

“This Academy – Jackson said again – is the most beautiful thing I have done in my life”. The DNA of Naples can be seen in the way it opens up to the city: 8 years ago, when the work with Apple began, Mayor Manfredi was rector of Federico II and he recalled that “young people are the transformation of the world and the ability of the young people who invest in our city is fundamental for us”. It can also be seen in the attention and investments of the Region: the councilor Fascione, with responsibility for research, innovation and startups, recalled that the Academy is the first, great opportunity to connect Campania as an international ICT hub with investments , technology transfer strategies and the ability to attract young people. And it shows with the university itself: the rector of Federico II, Matteo Lorito, said it clearly: “We we produce brains and intelligences, we prepare them and then they go out into the world. But they also come back, and attract companies and institutions which in turn help us to ensure that these minds go back to work in our lands, in Italy, in the South”.

Above all, the Academy is located in a brand new building of the Polo Tecnologico in the center of an area of ​​Naples, the district of San Giovanni a Teduccioto be re-evaluated and which is rapidly being re-evaluated: a public-private ecosystem has been created which attracts investments and gives rise to fertile ground for startups and young talents in what was once the district of blue hulls and cigarette smuggling.

Instead, now, the Future Fair is held, the fair of the future, organized by Federico II on 28 and 29 June with over 130 companies, many founded by former students, who came to look for new talent (and not vice versa) by looking right at the Tecnopolo and the Apple Academy. The boys and girls who presented their apps during the graduation ceremony, the result of the project carried out during their studies at the Academy, had 2-3 job offers already in your pocket by Italian and international companies.

Apps, among other things. An economy that for Apple’s iOS platform alone in Europe is currently worth more than 2.4 million jobs and in Italy it supports over 85 thousand jobs. An international economy, given that 54% of downloads come from outside one’s own country and which therefore opens up to foreign exchanges. Apps are the first proof of work for students.

On the stage of the Academy auditorium, 4 teams (3 from the institutional course and one from the Pier course, supported by an international foundation) presented their work. From the video game Destiny’s Altered Order of the Crow Crew guys, who brings order back to chaos and which according to Jackson clearly indicates the desire for recovery after the pandemic, to the app Helys from team 17 to record the daily synthesis of vitamin D through sunlight, a vitamin essential for health which is in deficit for 40% of Europeans and whose lack causes osteoporosis, depression, heart disease. Or the Mamart team, who created the BeezMath app to enable visually impaired or blind people to use their phone to write long and complex mathematical equationsup to the group that in collaboration with the BareFoot College International foundation went to Zanzibar to renew the Lumos app to help the solar mama, the illiterate women who build and sell solar panels to bring light and electricity to hundreds of villages without any infrastructure.

The most impressive thing though is the heart of it all, i.e. the students. It is for them that this program exists. An infinite parterre of girls and boys who speak a mix of English and Neapolitan words, learned above all from those who have come from abroad: from Spain to India, from Senegal to Portugal. It is the United Nations assembly in Naples, an Academy made up of young and relatively young people (Apple and Federico II do not set age limits and there are students as young as 40) who are confronted for the first time with a different way of learning , as opposed to that designed for traditional universities.

Code is the universal language to speak, but that’s just the beginning. The approach is based on tutoring, the creation of a safe environment that favors exchanges (no traditional classrooms but spaces where you can sit and talk, with a large screen on which you can write). The official definition is that of Challenge-based Learning, a collaborative learning model, based on a series of challenges that has its roots in a very rich and often neglected pedagogical tradition in traditional schools, especially in Italy. A tradition which, albeit with some distinctions and accents on various aspects of education, has had one of its most lucid interpreters in Italy with Mary Montessori.

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The students there are so many of the course: 300 happy and excited people, but above all happy. The 4 who met Lisa Jackson on behalf of the whole course were Alessio Iodice, who entered for curiosity and Apple-branded gadgets and found himself wanting to continue attending the Pier program; Camil Bourouiba, who found the place to learn how to build digital things; Maura DeChiara, a graduate in Neuroscience who deals with vision and wants to use Vision Pro to create new apps for people with disabilities; and Matthew Fountainwho with a degree in Languages ​​discovered that he could easily add a new one to those notes, coding.

There is an aspect of good news that is easy to forget. They cause strong emotions. Just like the bad ones, which unfortunately agitate all of us because they touch our fears, our insecurities and our anger. Even good news arouses strong emotions, and it doesn’t matter that Apple has always been a master in communication marketing, with its commercials and its keynotes that talk about rights and principles, as well as products and technologies. Because, to tell the truth, there are 300 kids, theirs enthusiasmthe joy clear and not contrived to have made a path who in one year changed their lives, with the knowledge that they really succeeded. And with them the staff of mentors, in some cases slightly older than them but just as enthusiastic.

That’s why in a country like ours, homeland of disenchantment and Machiavelli’s cynicism, one can take a risk and believe Jackson when he says that this is truly his finest creature: “I come here to refresh my DNA every year. Every time a student tells me this course is the The most beautiful thing he has done in his life makes me feel really good. When I came to Naples I felt that we should have done the Academy here, that this was the right place”. Here, by chance but then with a lot of work, the right variables have been crossed and the fruits are now visible. As Jackson said during the student awards, “our job is to be a mirror that reflects the light of universities around the world. And here there really is a lot of light”.