The engaging 2nd HESN Movie Night at the magnificent Makerere University Main Hall on Thursday October 8, 2015
Makerere University, School of Public Health – ResilientAfrica Network (RAN) held the 2nd Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) Student Movie Night on Thursday October 8th 2015 from 6:00pm – 8:00pm at Makerere University Main Hall – Main Building. It was a pleasure implementing this in collaboration with the Mozilla Uganda Team.
The collaborative learning opportunity ‘RAN Movie Night’ turned out to be a colorful event despite the previous strike tension within and around the higher institution of learning attracting 325 participants. The RAN team, students, faculty and the community joined in to watch an inspirational and developmental movie, “SPARE PARTS” which is a story about four unprivileged, undocumented immigrant teenage high school boys from a Phoenix High School who go toe-to-toe against a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students in an underwater robotics contest. Alas! They beat all odds and emerged winners of the competition. The movie brought forth various insightful lessons such as; belief in oneself, the importance of hard work, the relevance of working as a team, importance having a good and committed mentor, and the ability to inspire other people among others.
The audience then had a fruitful discussion and interaction about the developmental issues presented by the movie, lessons learned, threats and challenges that innovators face and how they cope with or overcome the threats among others.
RAN is part of the HESN and in a bid to stimulate student engagement in our innovation activities and promote inter-university HESN collaboration we host networking activities like Movie Nights. RAN has carefully planned and is implementing several innovation activities such as student innovation seed grants, training sessions in the Human Centered Design approach including Design Thinking classes, Needfinding, How to pitch, Story Telling, Student Internships and many more that will continuously be offered to students and details of these were shared during the Movie Night. Some of the upcoming opportunities that innovators could quickly participate in that were shared include;
- The social design clinic: – http://www.ranlab.org/social-design-clinic-generating-ideas-on-spot
- The RAN monthly Innovation Garage happening on Friday 30th October from 3:00pm – 6:00pm
- The Big Ideas Contest organized by UC Berkeley (HESN Lab), Details can be found on http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/health/ ,
- Students Media Grants http://condevcenter.org/opportunities-grants-and-more/
Dr. Roy William Mayega, the RAN Deputy Chief of Party in his closing remarks inspired participants of the Movie Night to work innovatively like the young high school boys in the movie, “SPARE PARTS”, be the next authors of game changing solutions and become innovators like Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook.
