Hi, I’m Cecilia!

I want to become an innovative, disruptive force that will change the course of our current educational system and narrow the gap in education equity opportunities in which we unfairly live.

Hi! I’m Cecilia, from Chile. My strong vocation for social service has always been the core center of anything I do. With the conviction that creativity is one of the important issues missing in the education of children in Chile, I co-founded a nonprofit organization: “Chile a Soñar”. Based on the design thinking methodology, its main goal was to foster creativity as a tool to promote a mentality of opportunity seeking and entrepreneurship. With this purpose, we started an afterschool program in the rural community of Pumanque were we organized over 200 interdisciplinary workshops.

Given my experience combining the arts with education, the topic I chose to study for my undergraduate design thesis was how the learning experience of students could be enhanced by design, aiming to prove that it doesn’t matter where we study, but instead how we learn. As a result, I created a musical video about Mayan history and tested it in three schools against socioeconomic statuses (SES) as a variable. I uploaded my video on youtube and it has helped over 254,000 children and teachers all over the world.

My curiosity for understanding how schools work around the world led me to organize an exploratory trip to visit rural schools in developing countries. I visited the Khayay School in Myanmar, the Riverside School in India, and also spent three months as a volunteer in Mozambique, where I worked in a rural school of Maringwe.

Currently, I’m studying an MA in Digital Media Design for Learning because I’m convinced that technology can narrow the gap between schools’ socioeconomic status by offering quality learning resources to a broader audience at lower costs.

The reason I joined the UNLEASH LAB 2017 is because I love challenges, I’m an entrepreneur by nature and there is nothing that I enjoy more than using design to improve the life of people. To understand what I want to achieve at this lab please read my second post: “Happy Teachers”.