Community Service Project – Shabab Lab

By Chadi Nakhle, HOS Secondary

Dear Parents of Secondary 1 LP Students,

In an effort to give the opportunity to our students to do some Community Service work, even online, we have decided to team up with An NGO called Shabab Lab.

Your children will meet every Wednesday after classes, starting today, 24 March 2021 and until the end of May 2021, for a 30-minute session with the Supervisor Mr. Charbel El Helou,  to work together on a project through the Shabab Lab’s online platform.

Last Monday, the CEO of Shabab Lab, Mrs. Mona Itani, gave your children an informative session during assembly about the project and the platform.

For more information about Shabab Lab and this initiative, please visit their website, or find the below excerpt from an explanatory email which we received from Shabab’s CEO Mrs. Itani.

“Shabab Lab is the first social innovation e-learning platform in the Arab world. Our vision is to transform the youth in the Arab world into change-makers and social innovators. The platform acts as a virtual innovation lab, providing the youth with a space to learn 21-st century skills, tinker, and create social innovation solutions that will help their communities and the planet a better place.

Through our tested and validated hands-on and project-based programs, participants will create technology-enabled projects that solve real problems in their community in an innovative and entrepreneurial way.

For the academic year 2020-21, we are offering a program for 10th-grade students entitled “A Web for Change”. The program will span between March 25 and May 25, 2021. The theme for this program is the Environment, where the project’s focus can be on any or a combination of the UN 2030 SDG’s 6,7,11,12,13,14,15 along with the cross-cutting SDG’s in all our programs namely 5,8,9,10,17.

In the program, the students will learn the essentials of social innovation, design thinking, web development, lean startup methodology, and pitching. No prior knowledge in these areas is required.

In addition to the asynchronous modules which the participants need to complete on Shabab Lab and which should take a maximum of 20 hours, the students will need to apply their learning in a project of their choice. Working in teams is highly encouraged. Participating students need to select and clearly define an environmental problem and create a web-app solution to solve/alleviate it while creating a business plan and pitching the business by the end of the program.

The students will be asked to submit deliverables from their project progress along the way to ensure they are meeting the required milestones. They will get feedback on their submissions from a designated person/instructor from their school or from Shabab Lab’s team.

The submitted video pitch will be evaluated by an expert jury from the entrepreneurship space and the top teams will win valuable awards including cash USD as part of the Shabab Lab Youth Social Innovation Competition for 2021.”