Exploring Education and Innovation
Patrick Engelhardt
Together with Abi, one of our 3rd year apprentices, I was able to visit Ryan Geel and his partners in Cape Town. In this blog post, I would like to tell you about my personal highlights of the week, both the part of our work and our private excursions over the weekend.
On our third day in Cape Town, we had the opportunity to visit the University of Western Cape together with Ryan. There we first met Ruchen Wyngaard, who is a lecturer at the UWC. He is also one of the authors of the content that Ryan teaches the interns in the Life Choices Academy. He gave us a brief tour of the campus and showed us the rooms where he teaches and works with the students on projects, some of which are carried out across national borders with other universities.
Afterwards, we were able to meet Wouter Grove from The Future-Innovation Lab, which is a similar institution to the Life Choice Academy.
It was particularly great that Ryan was able to meet interns from former LC Studio courses again, who acquired further skills in the lab there, as both institutions rely on different technologies.
My highlight of the weekend was a visit to Penguin Beach, where I got to see penguins in the wild for the first time in my life. We were even lucky enough to see some of them nesting and even some baby penguins.
As Ryan accompanied us that day, we also learnt a lot about the area around Cape Town. It was impressive to hear that every 1-2 years most of the vegetation burns down due to the dry climate. Due to the experience with fires, teams from Cape Town were even flown to California, where the big fires where happening there.
Finally, Ryan showed us a restaurant that is popular with the locals, where we enjoyed some incredibly good fish’n’chips together.
