Las Cocinas Workshop: A Social Entrepreneurship Initiative

Social Challenge Addressed

This Social Business Plan addresses the limited availability of inclusive, high-quality, and customized educational resources for individuals with visual impairments and other specific learning needs. Despite advances in inclusive education policies, many educational environments still lack effective didactic tools that address sensory diversity.

Moreover, there is a lack of educational resources in STEAM vocations, compromising the quality of education where traditional learning methodologies prevail.

Description of the Solution / Business Idea

The proposed solution emerges from a university-based workshop called Las Cocinas. This space is an Industrial Design Engineering workshop, part of the Industrial and Civil Engineering School (EIIC) and located in the Nexo Innovation Space building, in the campus of ULPGC. Las Cocinas has transformed the space that once belonged to the kitchen of the ULPGC’s canteen, reinventing its name—las cocinas, meaning “the kitchen” in Spanish—by creating a collaborative learning space for engineering students within the ULPGC. Equipped with various digital manufacturing technologies and machines, Las Cocinas takes in several internship students every year who collaborate in diverse educational innovation projects and initiatives, as well as industrial design engineering projects. This workshop has the potential to involve engineering students in social initiatives and challenges, through a Service-Learning methodology combining academic learning with community service.

Therefore, the proposed solution transforms Las Cocinas into a Social Entrepreneurship involving engineering students, where the design, development and manufacturing of personalized education materials, such as haptic models, tactile learning materials and adapted board games, take place. These resources are specifically tailored to the cognitive, perceptual and emotional needs of learners with visual impairments. The initiative is grounded in the principles of User Experience based Design (UX), as well as other methodologies such as Learning Experience Design (LXD), and aims to bridge the gap between engineering education and social innovation by integrating inclusive design practices into the academic curriculum and research ecosystem.

Related UN Sustainable Development Goals

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