The Ashesi Innovation Experience is an intensive and exciting two-week enrichment program developed by faculty at Ashesi for senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 19. AIX expands the vision and aims of participants, and inspires, challenges, and equips them with skills for innovating in the 21st Century. The programme builds foundational skills in Leadership, Design, Entrepreneurship, Robotics, Creative Arts, and Engineering. This year, AIX will take place from 31st July to 14th August.
Required Modules
All participants at AIX will take two modules in the first week:
- Design: Creativity is an important component of problem-solving. Design offers a rich combination of creative and logical processes for reaching innovative solutions. Students are introduced to:
- Lateral thinking techniques
- Idea generation and brainstorming
- Prototyping and evaluation
- Divergent and convergent thinking
- Leadership: Leadership often means many different things to different people. Regardless of how it may be defined, it is important to raise leadership awareness in young people, to groom them as leaders for NOW and leaders for the future. The purpose of the leadership component of AIX is threefold:
- To equip young leaders to recognize, know and develop themselves as leaders.
- To equip young leaders to learn how to manage and lead others effectively.
- To inspire young leaders to be values-based agents of positive change and leave a legacy wherever they find themselves.
Optional Modules
Participants will choose one of these four modules for the second week of AIX:
- Creative Arts: This module will harness the inherent creative tendencies of students and adapt the various forms of the creative arts as a necessary skill for tackling and designing solutions to various problems. Students will be taken through sessions and activities that will help them harness and direct their creative talents intelligently. They will engage in and develop an appreciation for the creative arts and will also understand the role of the arts in the creative and cultural industries that shape and enrich their lives and the lives of others.
- Engineering: In the Engineering module, students’ curiosity is awakened through many fun-filled activities where they learn to create prototypes of any machine that they can imagine, with the aim of adding value to everyday activities.
- Entrepreneurship: This elective module teaches students how they can identify entrepreneurial opportunities within their environment by employing ethnographic research methods. They then learn how to and develop business models for these businesses by engaging stakeholders and using tools including the Lean Start-up model. This module is ideal irrespective of background and science of study, as it seeks to groom problem solving entrepreneurial leaders.
- Robotics: This elective module introduces students to the exciting field of robotics as an application of engineering and computer science. Students learn how to write computer programs to control machines (robots) and build these robots which can sense their environment and respond to it to solve real everyday problems.