Feyenoord and Chelsea Foundations join Forces
We are proud to see two EFDN members working together as the Chelsea Foundation visited the Feyenoord Foundation earlier this month to co-deliver the first ever Digital Blue robot football programme overseas, a collaboration which was first initiated back at the 10th EFDN Conference in Paris in March last year.
Staff from Chelsea Foundation’s education team visited the new Feyenoord Hub in south Rotterdam at the beginning of the month and delivered two sessions to 40 students from a local Rotterdam school.
Aged between 10 and 12-years-old, the students got hands-on with Sphero and the iPads to take part in robot football to learn basic coding skills, while pupils also took part in online coding challenges based on Star Wars, Harry Potter and Minecraft.
Chelsea Foundation’s head of education Matt Mead said: ‘In collaboration with our colleagues from the Feyenoord Foundation, we spent the day educating young minds to the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and why coding and computational thinking are such critical skills for young people to learn in the modern world.
’80 per cent of careers by 2020 will require some level of STEM knowledge, so sharing our Digital Blue programme with an international team and students, was a pleasure.
‘It was enjoyable to see Dutch children enjoying similar learning experience to their counterparts in London and how easy it was to overcome language barriers via learning, football and fun!
‘Having first shared our Digital Blue programme as a speaker at EFDN Paris in 2018, it’s great to kick off our first European partnership with Feyenoord.
‘Following EFDN 2019 at Stamford Bridge, we hope to add more European clubs to our network, so we can explore how Digital Blue can impact more students and teach these critical skills in more countries.’
Chelsea Foundation hosted a workshop at the 12th EFDN ‘#Morethanfootball’ Conference at Stamford Bridge last week where they presented their Digital Blue Sphero project to the attendees.
Last weeks Conference also opened up more discussions and opportunities for collaborations in STEM Education and football. Chelsea confirmed that they will host a one-day event at the end of May to which clubs and potential partners will be invited. The criteria for participation will be:
- Wide experience with educational programmes
- Serious interest to start with STEM education (or already started)
- Ability to start immediately after the event with available budge to invest an amount of €10,000 for a start-up package
Participating clubs will be the pioneers for the rest of Europe and in the coming we weeks we will send out an official invite to all EFDN Members, while Chelsea will invite their existing partners. Two other EFDN member clubs have already expressed an interest in taking part.
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