Digital school in a sailboat

Sail For Good -”Finnish Digital School in a Boat”

Family of five from Finland has turned their dream; sailing around the world, into large scale education export program. Sail For Good Education is an ecosystem project with over 20 partner companies in education and technology. The start of the expedition is in June 2016 and return to Finland in 2022. Six year epic adventure.

”It was clear from the start that we don´t just want to go sailing but we want to do something valuable and worthwhile on the way. We thought that since we need to take care of our own kids´ education, we could create something that also would benefit others, maybe the children along our route” Tuomo Meretniemi, Captain and Project Manager explains.

A year ago Meretniemi family started contacting educational technology companies with the idea of creating future digital school in a boat. The goal was to develop a solution that will be scalable and cost effective, so that it could be easily be implemented in any school. The parents are not teachers, so they needed find the best possible partners to work with them on their Sail For Good initiative.

Realizing the digitalization in education

Digitalization in education is globally a hot topic as countries and school are looking for more efficient ways to provide high quality education and cut costs at the same time. It is a complex challenge as schools need work effectively in multi-vendor environment; hardware, learning platforms, digital content, teacher training and data connections etc. When succesfully executed, however, digitalization will help countries to provide high quality education with a fraction of the cost compared to the traditional model.

”Our dream is to act as experimental laboratory for new kind of digital education tools, methods, platforms and content. With this we believe wa can do our share to make high quality education possible to everyone, everywhere. If we make it work in an extreme environment like in a boat, it´ll work anywhere”. Tuomo Meretniemi says.

There has never been such educational solution based on a true ecosystem focusing on customer experience realizing digitalization in education. Now there is.

Sail For Good Education has now attracted many cutting edge technology companies to co-operate. World´s number one laptop provider Lenovo will provide the hardware, Smart Learning platform will come from Claned Group and rapidly expanding IT service company 3 Step IT will offer life cycle management services for schools. Multiple digital content developers will provide curated educational content, applications and games for learning. Governmental edTech export program Future Learning Finland will also work in close co-operation with Sail For Good Education. Sail For Good Education partners include e.g. Claned Group, Lenovo, 3 Step IT, NatureGate, Distance Learning School Kulkuri, Sanoma Pro, Tabletkoulu, Moomin Language School, 10Monkeys.com, Fun Academy, SkillPixels, Seppo.io, Rockway, Future Learning Finland, eOppi and many companies specialized in marketing and communication.

SMART Internationalization® is a proud member of the Sail For Good Education – Finnish Digital School in a Boatecosystem to support the internationalization of the Finnish Edtech companies.

Picture: (C) Jari Salo

For more information, please contact:

Tuomo Meretniemi
Captain, Project Director
info@sailforgood.org
www.sailforgood.org
Tel: +358 50 3903050

Sail For Good expedition is a private initiative based on a sailing adventure around the world during 2016-2022 by Meretniemi family from Finland with three children. The goal is to experiment new ways to utilize technology and digital learning methods to enable education for all children anywhere, anytime.