Libra-net (8): Happy new year!
A wrap-up of 2022 and a roadmap for 2023. Plus a special video treat for our paid subscribers. Thank you for your ongoing support!
Dear subscribers,
We hope you had a restful holiday season and we wish you all the best in 2023! Below is an update of our foundation’s activities in 2022, plus a special video treat for our paid supporters who made it all possible.
1. As a follow up to our wildly successful ‘one minute of science’ challenge from 2021, we kicked off 2022 with a series of NZD (Science for Kids) Scratch tutorials, culminating with the Scratch for Switch competition. Our Scratch-master is David Arnaudov, a six-grader who has been programming for three years. Congratulations to David, and a big thank you to the company Polimed for donating the Nintendo Switch! Here is a link to the winning entry and the four amazing runner-ups.
2. In May we organized the first science conference for children. Over 100 kids made their own hologram, played with magnets, and asked questions about science topics. We also organized two online panels about the future of education, and had a closing reception with liquid nitrogen desserts and ‘cocktails’ in test-tubes. All of this was supported by the S(c)iesta community (a group of ~300 resarchers abroad), big thank you to everybody who donated their time, money and knowledge! Photos from the conference can be seen at the following link, and the media coverage can be found at Umno, Fakulteti, Telma, Republika, and many other news outlets.
3. Over the summer we organized ten workshops with the NZD science kits (click here for a father-and-son review of our kit, plus a hilarious reaction video). More than 200 kids received a science kit and had fun conducting the four experiments contained in it. Our NZD volunteers held two workshops in Berovo (donations by Sani Josifoski and Ilija Dukovski), one in Kicevo (donation by Bojan Angelov), two in Negrevo (donations by Violeta Ilik and Zoran Sunik and Pance Naumov), one in Negorci (donation by Ilina and Borce Siljanoski), one in Gevgelija (anonymous donor), and three in Kavadarci (donation by Dragan Tevdovski, Ana Zakovska, and an anonymous donor). The hyperlinks in this paragraph will take you to pictures from the individual workshops.
4. In the wake of the NZD conference, we were approached by the municipality Gjorce Petrov in Skopje and the elementary school Vlado Kantardziev in Gevgelija to establish a collaboration with our portal Science for Kids (NZD). The result is a campaign to annotate each of our 100+ NZD videos (59 science videos for the first semester, 69 for the second semester) with questions crowdsourced from students in the nine participating schools. The science teachers from these schools are now using our videos as homework assignments, and encouraging the students to create multiple choice questions that will serve as study-aids for the topics covered in class. By the end of the school year we expect each of our videos to also include a mini-quiz (see example) that can help students with their exam preparation. Our vision is to turn our DIY website into a professional NZD app that will gamify the learning experience.
5. In parallel with the question-asking competition, which only targets the schools mentioned above, we also created a question-answering competition that is open to every student in Macedonia. On our Facebook and Instagram pages we post questions related to the NZD educational videos, and every month we reward the student who answered the most questions correctly. We also hold a lottery where each correctly answered question is a lottery ticket for a chance to win a NZD T-shirt or science kit. Below is the lottery draw for the month of December, congratulations tо our winners!
6. Our S(c)iesta meetups continued throughout 2022, although the format has evolved to also include public S(c)iestas, as well as guest posts with Aleksandar Shulevski . We encourage you to check out our conversations with Bojan Pancevski, Marija Drenkovska, Zoran Sunik, Vladimir Atanasovski, Andy Perkins, Zlatko Vasilkovski, Kristijan Fidanovski and Branislav Gerazov, as well as the live S(c)iestas about the gamification of education (an in-person panel with Tanja Pavleska, Bojana Stojanova, Menka Stojanova and Maja Videnovik) and the technological innovations driving the future of education (a virtual panel with Nina Geometrieva, Andrej Risteski, Petar Popovski and Nikola Stikov). Stay tuned for exciting new topics and guests in 2023!
7. Nikola’s Substack essays were syndicated by the portals Umno, MKD.mk and Off.net. Nikola also contributed a piece on privacy at а conference organized by the Macedonian National Bank, was profiled by Umno.mk and Fakulteti.mk, gave interviews on national TV (Telma, Macedonian Radio Television), and his criticism of the beloved children’s book Zoki Poki was discussed on the morning program of the national radio service and was one of the most read articles on the portal Umno.mk for 2022. Also make sure to check out Nikola’s English essays about ChatGPT (here and here), as well as his commencement speech to the graduates of NOVA high school.
PARTNERSHIPS AND COLLABORATIONS
In addition to our home-grown projects, S(c)iesta and Science for kids, we continue to support a number of enthusiasts enriching the Macedonian academic and cultural life. In 2021 we gave seven 12,000 MKD (200 EUR) stipends to members of the Macedonian notebook factory team, and we also spearheaded the opening of the University Ss. Cyril and Methodius Center for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research. In 2022 the center got its first academic publication, whereas we continued to branch out beyond academia.
1. Our patron Toso Filipovski won the prestigious journalism award Mito Hadzivasilev Jasmin for his tireless work on documenting Macedonian rock history! Toso's rock encyclopedias were supported by Nikola Stikov, and they served as inspiration for the enthusiast-driven projects funded by Foundation KANTAROT. Toso gave an unforgettable acceptance speech in the Macedonian parliament, a pastiche of Macedonian lyrics that should be widely shared and loudly sung. We also supported Toso’s publication of Mizar Revelations 1981-2021, the first biography of a Macedonian rock band, and two LPs documenting Macedonian dark wave and Macedonian new wave music from the 80s. We never thought our foundation would be working with a music label, yet here we are:)
2. We were invited by the National book fare to hold a workshop about colors and CMYK printing. Check out this video to experience the atmosphere.
3. We donated science books for kids to the library in Makedonska Kamenica.
4. Our Science for Kids experimental kits were given out as awards for the Eduino game-athon.
5. We sponsored the Nihon-ji festival in Skopje and Dragana and Anita organized a workshop on kumihimo and monkiri for children interested in Japanese culture. Photos from the workshop can be found at the following link.
6. In collaboration with the the Skopje bottanical gardens, the Educational Center in Negrevo, and the Macedonian Ecological Society we organized a contest for counting cowslips. The contest encouraged people to go outside and observe heterostyly with the goal of collecting as much data as possible about the cowslip populations in Europe. The campaign was accompanied by a website, tutorials, workshops, stickers, and several educational videos. At the Science for Kids conference we gave out rewards to the students and classes who counted the most cowslips and who found the most remote wildflower locations.
7. The podcast Common People (Обични луѓе) returned for a third season that featured an alpinist living with cystic fibrosis, an ethnologist who worked as a croupier in a casino, a musician who hated being called an Elvis impersonator, a zookeeper, a librarian, a speleologist, and five women going through menopause. The podcast creator, Ilina Jakimovska paid it forward and used our contribution to jumpstart the Ethno club at the Institute for ethnology and anthropology at the University Ss. Cyril and Methodius. More info at the following link, we hope many people will enjoy the lazy bags donated by our foundation.
We are proud of the work we accomplished in 2022 and we are grateful to our board, our donors, our staff, and the volunteers who made it all possible. We look forward to continuing our efforts in the new year and we hope that you will support us in making a positive impact in our community!
And now a special treat for our paid subscribers, an early draft of a NZD video that is being created by the marketing agency Publicis. This video marks the beginning of our fundraising efforts in North America and will soon be made public (and hi-res:). Enjoy!