Engineering is often associated with polluting industry, noise and stench pollution and working in dirty conditions with a high risk of physical injury. These conditions are only partly true. Almost everything you touch, eat and drink, wear and use and see and hear requires technology. Even the bigger (environmental) problems will require technology to improve them.
With the EUTech Award, we want you to experience that there is a technical solution to almost every (social) problem. We will take you into practice and leave the classical curriculum. We will give guest lectures at school and you will have to work in a team, make compromises, choose possible solutions together, work under time pressure and deliver results within agreed timescales. Just like in practice, your proposals will be evaluated on innovation, effectiveness and feasibility. From each region (Limburg, Wallonia, Flanders, Eupen and Aachen), the group with the best proposal will take its entire class to a Euroregional final competition. The winning class will receive an award and take home € 1,000.
All winning ideas from the Euroregion have a high degree of realism. These groups will have the opportunity to discuss each other's ideas in a Euroregional cooperation. Professional industrial designers translated all ideas into product proposals. After mutual consultation, choices have to be made on how and with what you are going to make a prototype. Engineers will be present to support you in making these prototypes.
At the end of the day, the prototypes must be ready and everyone must give a presentation about the product. Here too, reality will be imitated. Communicating in three languages (German, French and Dutch) is difficult. In technology, the language of communication is English and that is also the language of communication for the Euregional Technology Award.
With the EUTech Award, we want to show you what technology means to you. You choose a problem (consciously or unconsciously) and you personally choose a solution direction and then a technical solution for your problem. Consciously or unconsciously, you make choices about subjects and solutions that mean something to you, but the technology behind them is almost always the unknown factor.