The problem ZENA solves

The German school system is stuck in the last century and hasn't even started to teach kids about web2 and relating basic concepts. Being a European female hacking team based in Berlin and partly being mothers of teenage girls and boys we have witnessed German kids suffering from pandemic restrictions for the past two years, exacerbated by the lack of a comprehensive strategy to lift schools into the digital age.

Our project aims to help German teenagers to close this knowledge gap by introducing web3 concepts and visions in a complexity reducing, hands on and gamified way. Apart from building for local communities we have also decided for an interface in German language to increase web3 accessibility even more. We want to encourage teachers and parents to use and further develop this modular tool in collaboration with the kids.

Having educator and project management backgrounds we are planning to organise IRL educational events like inclusive hackathons for kids and teenager to enable them to build open source collaborative problem solving tools for their future.

Challenges we ran into

The space needs more designer and also non tech builders and educators who can think in systems and bring more diverse perspectives into the space to tackle IRL problems! We did not get over this hurdle for ETHBerlin3 but addressed in several discussions with the hackathon organizers that for example next time the application process for the hackathon should be more accessible, for instance by making the application questionary less nerdy and crypto space specific. For our specific project it would have been nice to collaborate with young hackers who are closer in age to our target group.