NOOSPHERE

🌟 Hardware for Recovery Hackathon in Lviv: A Huge Success! 🌟 From November 22-24, Civitta and the IRON Lviv Tech Cluster hosted Ukraine’s top innovators to create hardware solutions for the country’s recovery. Out of 130+ applications, 27 teams participated, and 24 made it to the finals! 💪🇺🇦 💡 Winning Innovations: 🥇 Touch Vision (50,000 UAH): A 53-sensor system to improve visual-motor skills and reaction time. 🥈 Allbionics (30,000 UAH): Ukraine’s 100% locally made bionic hand and forearm prosthesis. 🥉 HowCow (20,000 UAH): Real-time cattle monitoring for smarter farming. 🌟 Special Recognition & Opportunities: - Each winning team received $25,000 AWS grants from Ukrainian Startup Fund. - NOOSPHERE Engineering School honored PL KPI of Igor Sikorsky team for their ePastukh solution. - HowCow was invited to join the Challenger Accelerator AI Bootcamp! 🚀🤖 This incredible event was made possible by the USAID Competitive Economy Program in Ukraine (USAID CEP), continuing Civitta’s mission to drive innovation for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Let’s celebrate the power of Ukrainian talent and innovation! 🎉 #Innovation #UkraineRecovery #LvivHackathon #TechForUkraine

Season's greetings from the Noosphere🎄 Wishing you a festive time filled with joy and the warmth of loved ones. May this Christmas bring you peace, happiness, and cherished moments💫 May the New Year ahead be filled with prosperity, success, and new opportunities✨

On November 19, 1997, independent Ukraine’s first astronaut flew into space on the American Space Shuttle Columbia🚀 Today, 27 years later, we want to showcase a short video from that historically significant event. We are sure that most of you already know about the first astronaut from independent Ukraine to fly into space, but have you ever seen the original video? We watch it with bated breath every time, fully aware of its historical importance. Thanks to technology, we can still see it even after all these years. Let us give you a few more details👇🏼 Twenty-six years ago, on Nov. 19 1997, at 19:46 UTC, a Ukrainian trident, Taras Shevchenko's “Kobzar,” a CD by the Ukrainian rock band Vopli Vidoplyasova, a yellow and blue flag, and the Ukrainian anthem were launched into space. They were brought along by Leonid Kadenyuk, independent Ukraine’s first astronaut, who flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia alongside an American crew. The mission lasted almost 16 days, during which Kadenyuk and his crewmates successfully conducted a number of experiments aimed at studying the effect of weightlessness on plants. These experiments opened up new opportunities for scientific research and paved the way for fruitful cooperation between Ukraine and the United States in the field of space research. Have you seen this video before? Tell us how it makes you feel! ____ The video comes from one of NASA’s official channels➡️ https://lnkd.in/dk57S-5h

Friends, today is World Science Day for Peace and Development 🌎 This day is dedicated to drawing attention to science and its importance for human development, emphasizing its relevance in everyday life, and encouraging scientific research at the international level for the benefit of society. Science unites countries, cultural communities, and people to achieve peace, security, and sustainable development. It is thanks to science that humanity is moving forward and finding new ways to solve global challenges, from environmental protection to progress in medicine and technology. Today is a great day to recognize the contribution of scientists everyone in creating a better future for everyone and to thank them for their daily work, which makes the world safer and more sustainable 🌱💡 We at the Noosphere Association understand the importance of science, and we have been popularizing it for many years through our own initiatives🤝 Let's develop science together, for peace and prosperity!

On November 8 National STEM Day is celebrated in the USA🤖 NGO "Association Noosphere" could not miss this holiday because all our activities are aimed at popularizing STEM in Ukraine. STEM education will soon permeate all fields of knowledge, so we must think about how to prepare children and young people for the challenges of the future. STEM (eng. Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) is a new approach to the educational process where the basis of acquiring knowledge is the simple and accessible visualization of scientific phenomena🙌 Why STEM? 🔹 Compared to regular education, STEM gives children more independence. They learn to be responsible for their own education and not rely on the success of other people. 🔹 A hands-on approach to learning is the foundation of STEM. Children learn by working on a specific project, and as a result, they create a prototype of a real product with their own hands. This way, they learn how to apply scientific and technical knowledge in real life. 🔹 STEM emphasizes visualization. Students generally use visualization tools during classes: blackboards, posters, flip charts, etc. It helps to learn complex technical and scientific concepts better. In addition, children learn not only to demonstrate ideas and proposals but also to present their own projects. 🔹 STEM fosters a special way of thinking. During classes, children learn to find various ways to solve problems. They become more consistent in their studies while not being afraid to look for non-standard solutions. 🔹 STEM education teaches children to work in a team: freely express their opinions, exchange ideas, solve problems, move past conflict situations, and achieve positive results together. 🤝 In Ukraine, the implementation of STEM principles is starting as part of the reforms of the New Ukrainian School. This innovative development concept isn’t new and is actively being developed by the public sector: the NGO “Association Noosphere”, founded by philanthropist Max Polyakov, has been building an ecosystem of engineering creativity in Ukraine for more than 8 years. The Noospherean ecosystem allows working with children through competitions and master classes in rocket modelling and robotics, students within the walls of the Noosphere Engineering Schools, and budding engineers join engineering and space hackathons. Thus, the NGO “Association Noosphere” helps to raise those enthusiasts who are our future  engineers, scientists, and specialists in the aerospace industry, designing and launching aircraft.

🙌 Dear friends, if you have been with us for a long time then you already know that the Noosphere Association has been actively building up the STEM community in Ukraine. We work hard to show teachers, pupils, and students that STEM education is interesting, interactive, modern, relevant, and technical. And, most importantly, this approach also provides children with practical knowledge that will be useful in rebuilding Ukraine. 🤖 Robotics in particular is becoming increasingly popular among schoolchildren and students in Ukraine. The Noosphere Association is happy to be playing a role in this trend, and we’re proud to announce that we are officially the first organizer of VEX Robotics events in Ukraine. VEX Robotics is an educational robotics program that, in America, has become as popular as Legos, and the VEX community has entered the Guinness Book of Records as the robotic competition boasting the largest number of participants. Importantly, VEX construction sets stand out for their emphasis on programming. Learning through play, assembling, and programming robots makes VEX especially engaging. As early as spring 2022 the Noosphere Association began working with the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation (REC), the organizers of worldwide competitions using VEX Robotics platforms. In support of our activities, the REC Foundation provided Noosphere with VEX 123 and VEX GO Classroom Kits. Thanks to these kits, Noosphere has already held several events, including the Noosphere STEM Camp, the VEX Roboweek, the VEX Maze Challenge, the VEX Marathon, and many others. In January 2023, Noosphere was granted the status of Event Partner and held the first official VEX Robotics event in Ukraine, joining the global network of world competitions using the platform. This event, the VEXcode VR Cleanup Challenge, attracted 1192 participants 👧 👦 We enjoy the pace of things and we are sincerely happy with how quickly future engineers and inventors get excited about robotics during our events. Moreover, thanks to the VEX Marathon project, we are also seeing teachers get acquainted with the new platform for themselves. It is very cool that this community of like-minded people is growing, because it is through these combined efforts that we are nurturing future engineers and inventors who will be instrumental in rebuilding our Ukraine

For the eighth year in a row, the Noosphere Association team has been organizing the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Ukraine. And every single time it turns out interesting, scientific, and spacey! 🪐💫 The geography of the NASA Space Apps Challenge Dnipro is quite extensive: this year participants from Poland, the Czech Republic and Canada all joined Ukrainians in the competition. This year, in fact, we had an all-time record of 247 participants, 58 teams, and 48 projects presented to local jury members. Due to the war in Ukraine, the hackathon had to be held online, but students and mentors in different cities came together to work on projects in a dynamic atmosphere at different Noosphere Engineering School locations. 🏆 During the project defense phase, each team put in a tremendous effort to win. These efforts included creative presentations, participants rapping, AI-generated melodies played on the cello, and many other interesting things. According to Hackathon rules, though, only 5 teams can be chosen as winners. This year’s winners were: 🔸Space Pigs. A project that uses NASA data from satellites and ground-based instruments to create visual representations of the solar storms in May 2024, helping a wide audience better understand the impact of such events. 🔸Craft Lab. Pocket Universe - a simple DIY hardware solution for learning exoplanet detection methods. The project can also be used to demonstrate eclipses or other phenomena in STEM education. 🔸Voice of the Stars. Exploring the universe through art and science: by transforming starry sky data into music, the project blurs the boundaries between science and art and offers a unique way to use astrophysical data. 🔸Veritasium's Witnesses. Developing an algorithm for updating software on devices that are already on the Moon or for installing it on new devices. 🔸Hydrolics - Infinite Horizons. A Python-based computer program designed to identify seismic tremors and extract only useful signals to send back to Earth, based on real data from the Apollo missions and the Mars InSight Lander. We look forward to the global stage! 👏

Today marks the beginning of World Space Week. This year's theme is "Space and Climate Change."🪐 Some historical background: World Space Week, established by the United Nations in 1999 and celebrated annually from October 4-10, brings together thousands of organizations and individuals from around the world to celebrate contributions and achievements in space exploration. Just imagine: in 2023 World Space Week was celebrated with more than 16,000 events taking place in 83 different countries! Our initiatives are traditionally included in World Space Week events, and we have been adding them to the global map of space events for many years. In 2024, the international space community is actively discussing the significant link between space exploration and climate change. This topic encourages us to dig deeper into the research to understand how space is essential for sustainable development on Earth. This World Space Week theme has become a central topic of the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2024 hackathon, as “The Sun Touches Everything” is about the sun, space, and its impact on everything around us. This year, for the eighth time, Noosphere is serving as the organizer for the local stage of the NASA Space Apps Challenge Dnipro👌🏽 You still have time to register! Follow the link below: https://lnkd.in/dtr8uasY In the meantime, we will continue to popularize science, technology, and space exploration during World Space Week and every other week of the year too 😉

Happy Independence Day, Ukraine🇺🇦 Thus it was, is, and it always will be. Today, this day is especially important for us, because we have realized our strength as never before. More than ever, we have come to know our strength, unity, identity, freedom, and drive for historical justice, which we are certain to attain. We work for the good of the country, nurture generations of future winners, scientists and inventors, and hug our loved ones at every opportunity. We thank the Armed Forces of Ukraine! Everything will be Ukraine!

We’d like to present a video prepared by the Noosphere Association as part of the project "The Heritage We Are Losing: We Must Not Forget, We Must Remember"! 🇺🇦 This video represents another step towards achieving the project's goal of raising awareness among Ukrainian citizens and the international community about cultural and historical heritage sites in our country's temporarily occupied territories and the inadmissibility of forgetting them. This is why the video is bilingual, with both Ukrainian and English subtitles. We invite you to share the video widely so that as many people as possible can learn about this important topic! 🙌 The history and spirit of the Ukrainian people cannot be taken away, and that is why we must remember, preserve, and nurture everything! The Noosphere Association is a partner of the GOHeritage All-Ukrainian NGO Network. “The Heritage We Are Losing: We Cannot Forget, We Must Remember” initiative is being implemented with co-financing from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) within the framework of the Agency for the Development of Private Initiative’s "Heritage Advocates: Support and Promotion of Local Initiative Groups of Youth” project.