Summer School KIVO turned my view on the significant stages of the project. The program was arranged in such a way that every evening there was a process of reassessment of knowledge. Thanks for your work!

The KIVO Summer School is a large-scale event to transform both our projects and ourselves. This year it was held in an online format, but the semi-finalists of the competition, in my opinion, only benefited from this. For 3 weeks we attended lectures by famous speakers, workshops, discussed pressing problems in the format of a collective mastermind group. All this allowed us to concentrate as much as possible on the project and the prospects for its promotion. The Summer School program was built on the principle of "from a calm pace to full immersion", thanks to which every day I became more and more immersed in the values of my project, analyzed social effects and predicted scaling. Regular consultations with the tracker and his recommendations were very important (my tracker was Nadezhda Averina): this is not only mentoring the project, but also psychological support, motivation, which we often lack so much. A nice bonus of the Summer School was the random coffee format, when the participants randomly met with honorary experts. I was able to talk with the winners of KIVO - 2019 Alla Mallabiu and Zoya Boitseva, who gave me very valuable advice on the directions for the development of inclusive values in my project. The format of classes at the Summer School was very dynamic, as meaningful as possible, supporting concentration of attention and efforts. Despite being online, the School has a very warm and friendly atmosphere.

Our project offers a solution to combat bullying of children with disabilities in schools. The team came up with a children's comic strip with superheroes who learn the "secret language" - the sign language of the deaf and hard of hearing. At the Summer School, the expertise of our project is very important to us. We came here to understand what schools need, how we can build interaction with them. We have already translated the comic into six languages and are now translating into two more. We would like to work with the project correctly and draw up a program taking into account the wishes of the experts. We also want to get acquainted with the partners of KIVO. We found the Russian Textbook corporation very interesting, because our project is designed for schoolchildren. Through our comic book, children will learn that heroes with hearing disabilities live in the world, that some children wear hearing implants. If the child knows what it is about, then he will not have misunderstanding and aggression. It is important for us that as many schoolchildren and teachers as possible learn about this.

For us, the KIVO Summer School was a kind of test and prioritization. We managed to look at ourselves from the side of different people. We became convinced that we often need to "go to the people". Working with experts, specialists and trackers has been very helpful in expanding my knowledge of business projects. It was very useful to look at other teams in terms of the educational projects market. Thanks to the organizers for such an atmosphere.

The school was very succinct and eventful. Even those things that I seemed to know and before school began to understand much better after it. In general, I got the impression that it is not enough to know in such an area as a startup, you have to dive in, try - then you begin to realize the real processes taking place in the market. In addition to the area of knowledge, a certain area of ignorance was opened, it became clear what to work on next, what steps to take.

I believe that KIVO is an excellent tool, firstly, for big players, customers, structures such as Skolkovo, the Higher School of Economics Institute of Education, the Ministry of Education and Education. It is necessary that we have people with really interesting ideas and projects that we can pick up, support, include in our ecosystem and help in development. Secondly, the competition is a great way for participants to test their ideas through the jury, go through an educational program, and even better, at the end, get financial resources or help from partners for the development of their project. Sometimes, when you are at the start and you have a brilliant idea, literally a few thousand rubles or a couple of worthwhile recommendations may not be enough to launch your project.

This is not the first year that we have been partners of KIVO, because we believe that well-developed individual initiatives can give a qualitative result in changing the education system. From year to year, the quality of the submitted projects improves, they become more complex and complex. We believe that it is this systematic approach to supporting the best initiatives of the competition from year to year that bears fruit and gradually improves our entire education system.

A couple of dozen projects a year go through "SOL", of which we give money to one or two. I would like the investment figures to be a hundred times higher. This means we need to create more. Anyone with an idea should know where to go and what to do in order for the idea to turn into a great great project. That is why we love the KIVO mission so much. When every student knows about such contests and that at the age of 17 he will be able to launch his own startup with their help, then everything will definitely be fine. After all, the future of education is the Klondike.

It was bright, exciting, emotional. I am infinitely grateful to Diana and everyone, everyone who created this competition, which helps: 1. Look at your project with a new, fresh look. 2. Shows strengths and what still needs to be worked on. 3. Chat with experts and learn from experience. It was an amazing adventure that began in June and continues to this day. It seems to me that every time we were charged with energy and embodied all our thoughts in a project. Thank you for such a motivation for action, for your support, for believing in us :) After such a start, just go ahead!

The winner in special nominations of the Institute of Education HSE, ASI and HSE Business Incubator.
After participating in the "Nursery KIVO" event, our project received a great response in social networks, and in the final part of the Competition we received an "Audience Award". Such success and recognition inspired us, gave us faith in ourselves and in the future of the project. The experts at the KIVO Summer School provided us with many recommendations, advised to work on scaling of our methodology in order to reach the all-Russian level.
But our main achievement was the support of the Institute of Education, which had become our mentor, provided us with a cash grant and also contributed to the development of the methodical and legal parts of the project. The Agency for Strategic Initiatives offered us to pass an expert review, and so we had become the residents of the HSE Business Incubator. Now, together with our partners, we are developing a self-instruction manual, which will help teenagers to learn Russian. KIVO is an excellent platform to start developing your innovative educational project. We wish prosperity to the Competition and advice young professionals not being afraid to offer new ideas and participate.

At the KIVO Summer School, we managed to get a lot of important comments and advice from experts from different industries. We did not win in the final, but thanks to serious expertise, tips and a competent assessment of our project at KIVO, we rethought the concept of the project, and focusing on the strengths of the product, we finalized it. Since the finale, we have met with the publishers of educational manuals, and our project has received support from ASI. The main result of participation in KIVO is acquaintance with many companies and experts involved in the development of educational projects, and, of course, useful feedback from all KIVO participants: organizers, experts, other finalists of the competition and visitors to the EdCrunch conference.

The competition allowed us to publicly declare our project, after which we simply could not help but implement it. In 2016, we held a series of open lectures and the first Agrohackathon in Russia, where solutions for smart home and vertical vegetable gardens were created. In 2017, we plan to repeat this event and host four Agrohackathons related to city farms and smart suburban mini-farms. At the same time, we are forming a community for the development of city farming in Russia, and we also plan to create an online course on this topic. We hope that thanks to our team this year the first roof farm will appear in Moscow. On my own behalf, I would like to thank the entire Contest team for their amazing sensitivity, responsiveness and assistance in the development of Urbani Eco. I recommend everyone who is engaged in educational projects or only intends to participate in the Competition and use it as a platform for launching and developing their project.

We came to KIVO-2016 with an idea. Rather, even with a dream. With the dream of organizing a big business, entering the international market. We were at the very beginning of the journey, and it was not clear where to go next. Everything changed at the Competition: the "expert tube" helped us to package our dream into a beautiful, structured presentation and develop a plan for further actions. KIVO-2016 has become a launching pad for us. We realized the importance of our project, in the final of the competition we received financial support, which accelerated our development, believed in ourselves, and most importantly, we decided where to move on. And then - just forward! We are now working non-stop on the first version of the product and will soon be ready to present the prototype to the public. Thanks to participation in the Competition, our project is no longer just a dream or a beautiful idea, but a very complex high-tech development. Of course, a long and difficult road awaits us, but a start has been made, and we are not going to give up.

There are many events that position themselves as "idea factory". I would call KIVO "a factory where they teach to implement already generated ideas and look for points of their further growth." Conventionally, all work at the school can be divided into speeches by the organizers and invited experts and the work of the participants themselves, the authors of the projects. Of the lectures organized, there was not a single formal one made for show. At the summer school, there is an excellent opportunity to see the results of speeches and finalization of presentations after individual consultations with experts, and compare them with the first options, which allows us to say that the set of activities of the school has a real effect. My project, which is a set of computer programs aimed at developing left-handers, won special nominations from the HSE Institute of Education and from Microsoft, which served as a good impetus for the development of the project. The KIVO 2015 competition is over. Work on the Left-handed project continues. We are developing programs for preparing handwriting for writing, and we expect to complete it in March-April. We are planning to launch the project website in the spring.

The most important consequence of KIVO for me was the understanding of what our project needs. While you work on the sly, you do not see the prospects. The experts at KIVO made me understand that I need to plan far ahead, helped me formulate my requests for the future. Well, and, of course, the KIVO finals became an opportunity to acquire many useful contacts, which, I hope, will help the project develop. Now the project is developing within the planned framework, we are coming up with new products, using new promotion channels. There are no jumps, but I hope they will be after active work with partners whom we found thanks to KIVO.

KIVO for us is the most valuable experience and a launching pad for the implementation of the project. We came to the competition with one idea, having no idea how to develop it further. At the summer school, they helped us to polish the concept itself, put it on the shelves, explained clearly how and by what means to promote the project, and, of course, the final chord - "access to the body" of specific investors and partners. Thanks to the valuable advice of the organizers of KIVO, it was possible, in our opinion, to competently present the project. As a result, we received a special prize from the Agency for Strategic Initiatives and the attention of many people and companies interested in the project. With the money allocated by ASI, we made a prototype of the application, which we are now testing on our target audience - children and parents. The next step is to create the first version of the service, which can be downloaded to smartphones in the coming months. We will present the finished product to a wide audience and investors. Our team worked on the project for about a year, but the dynamics of movement began only after participating in KIVO.

First of all, participating in the competition and winning it helped to believe in myself and to continue testing various career guidance products. Both trips became important, which became possible thanks to a travel grant (to the west, and then to the east coast of the United States). New contacts have appeared, more people have learned about the project.