As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
We are team Kullen, a group within the minor program Embrace at Fontys | Pulsed. Our first collaboration started when we received the challenge to create a product for a specific person during lockdown (our user). The challenge would take up two weeks, half way through the second week our product should be done so it can be delivered to the user!
When these teams were created, they were created at random, so none of us had ever seen each other before. The four of us, team Kullen first met each other online, through a video call.
On the first day of the challenge we briefly got to know each other and together did online research on already existing solutions that keep people busy while at home. Later on the first day we met with our assigned user, Stefan. We asked Stefan about his interests, hobbies, frustrations, and a lot more. We found out that Stefan had to give up tennis because of the pandemic and the following lockdowns, so here we saw an opportunity to create a product for Stefan with which he could ‘pick up tennis again’.
We decided to help Stefan by helping him ‘pick up tennis again’ by creating a small tennis racket which could keep track of how many consecutive hits were made. A small tennis game for Stefan, so he can keep practicing his dexterity, which comes in very useful during an actual tennis match.
What was cool was that Pulsed gave all of the students the opportunity to come work at their physical location. Luckily every member of team Kullen lived in or near Eindhoven, so we decided to all start working on location at the Pulsed room. It was a real welcome change of pace to actually meet fellow students in a “real life” setting. We got to know each other better, learned about our different majors, skills sets & interests. We discovered that our team had a wide variety of skills that we could put to good use in this challenge.
Within a single day at the Pulsed room we managed to create a first prototype of our product. We were really happy about the result and what we achieved in just a single day This was a great motivator for us to keep going and keep iterating on our product and continue improving it.
Within a few more days we created our final product! Then the product got delivered to Stefan’s door and he managed to quickly assemble the product due to the instructions we send with the product.
He even sent us a video of him playing with the assembled tennis racket that we created for him!
We were and still are extremely happy with the end result and glad that we had the opportunity to work together and meet each other. The biggest motivator of this challenge was the Pulsed room which provided us with all the needed tools, materials, and space to work productively and safely together (and see people in real life :).
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
As a secondary school graduate, choosing the next step in your education may feel like a scary leap. Nothing to worry about: Pulsed Empower is here to support you. This inspiring, challenging program enables secondary school graduates to uncover their uniqueness and put it to satisfying use. Empower focuses on your wants, needs and abilities and helps you find the direction that fits you like a glove.
Empower is all about the strength of creating. The emphasis is on learning through experiencing, doing, sometimes failing, and starting all over to finally succeeding. That is why books are optional, not mandatory. Empower turns every day into an innovative field trip filled with technology, entrepreneurship, and creativity. At the same time, you stay socially connected with other students and lecturers.
Smashing the status quo, breaking the mould, shaping a new one … just to break it again. Our fast-paced, ever-changing world demands equally evolving education. That is why Fontys Pulsed Academy puts its daring spin on it, based on better, broader, exciting design-based learning. Our curriculum is never finished, our thirst for knowledge and skills is never quenched, and our ambition is never fully achieved.
Fontys Pulsed Academy offers student-centred, talented-based teaching approaches captured in five act-provoking programs. These are primarily aimed at a challenging cocktail of technology & craftmanship, entrepreneurship & business, and design & creativity. Additionally, we offer expeditions for educators to take ownership and (re)design the education of their institute.
