In May, five students from TTK UAS supervised by the lecturers Britt Petjärv and Helen Kiis took part in the intensive study week of the international VAKEN project at the Kaunas University of Applied Sciences where the aim was to search for creative ideas to raise the popularity of the Open Air Museum of Lithuania among young people.

Students from five different countries came together to help the Open Air Museum of Lithuania which wants to be more attractive and receive more visits from young people. During the week the student teams worked on different intriguing solutions that were presented to the museum on the last day.

Teams offered as solutions different activities for young people such as a food festival, technological solutions to make the exhibit more interactive such as scent marketing or holograms, but also new ways to promote the museum such as a pop-up museum.

The supervisors explained that the aim was to get to know different methods of problem-solving, practice working in international teams, and develop creative and critical thinking.

The participating TTK UAS students said that the VAKEN project was a great challenge as it required them to find solutions to real-life problems. The museum will probably be using some of their ideas in the future.

VAKEN is a project of the Nordplus programme that aims to create tools to enable students to learn key soft skills demanded by business, practice them using toolkits in digital laboratories, and use them in real-life projects with SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs from different parts of the region and create an example use case in the form of Intensive Weeks. Project partners are HE institutions from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania and Latvia.