Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Agamenon Magalhães

Turning students into social entrepreneurs

Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Agamenon Magalhães (ETEPAM), a secondary school in Recife, Brazil, builds creative gadgets and computer software that address some of the biggest social and environmental issues facing the local community today.

Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Agamenon Magalhães (ETEPAM), a secondary school in Recife, Brazil, builds creative gadgets and computer software that address some of the biggest social and environmental issues facing the local community today.

Established in 1928, Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Agamenon Magalhães is considered the country’s first state school. Pursuing a focus in tech, it is an institution that seeks to prepare young students for the future. In order to reduce the rate of dropouts, the school involves itself in developing programmes that encourage entrepreneurialism and the value of social responsibility.

The crowning achievement of this ambition is Life Up, a social entrepreneurship workshop that has given birth to numerous projects that address the community’s most pressing issues. In addition to addressing community problems through the SDG Goals, Life Up aims to develop new skills such as empathy, communication, research, technology in students that make them more prepared for society, reduce dropouts, and propose an interactive and incremental educational setting where students collaboratively build their academic knowledge with a social purpose.

The first project of Life Up sought to tackle waste and prevent scorpions, cockroaches, rats and mosquitos from being attracted to discarded coconut remains by reusing coconut fibres to make ecological bricks. When the community faced landslides during the rainy season, Life Up launched the “Carpet of Life”, a bio blanket that helps reduce water pollution in rivers. Another project was called “Cangame,” a software that helps autistic students in their studies. Since its launch, the software has been used in 23 different countries and has aided autistic students who have struggled with their speech and communication.

Student interest surged in the wake of the Life Up workshop; many who had participated in the project found themselves presenting their work at science fairs and business roundtables.

If Escola Técnica Estadual Professor Agamenon Magalhães were to win the World’s Best School Prize for Innovation, it would use the funds to expand the Life Up project even further, extending the workshop to indigenous schools in rural areas and education programmes in prisons for teenagers and adults.