TEDxKids@Brussels: Helping Kids to Save the World

TEDx@Brussels is a TEDx event in Brussels, Belgium.

Last December, at their regular TEDxBrussels event, they asked "Who’s going to save the world?" and got some great answers, but later realized that if anyone can save the world, it's today's kids.

Their upcoming TEDxKids@Brussels event was conceived as a way to help kids do just that.

The event will host a combination of 48 10-year-old kids, and 400 attendees of both kids and adults. The 48 kids will be in workshops, getting their hands dirty, soldering, tinkering, hacking and composing. At the same time, the 400 attendees of the main event, will enjoy an all-day program of leading thinkers, experts and makers. They'll get regular updates on the workshops from some leading child psychologists throughout the day.

The event is hosted by Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing and TEDxKids@Brussels speakers (many of whom have already spoken at TED) include:

Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of O’ Reilly’s Make Magazine
Hackasaurus, hardcore Mozilla Foundation: Atul Varma, Mozilla’s executive director Mark Surman, Matt Thompson and Jessica Klein)
Technology Will Save us, extreme hardware hackers Bethany Koby, Daniel Hirchmann  and Evan Raskob
The Tinkering School with Gever Tully himself
Walter Bender, inventor of OLPC's Sugar system
Ed Baafi, MIT MediaLab who ‘makes almost anything’
Uncompromising Creative Commons blogger Cory Doctorow
G-man, Gabe Zicherman, founder of Gamification
Mysto & Pizzi, East Coast Black Eyed Peas remixers
Jamie Oliver, cook of cooks
Tan Le, maker of Emotiv's brain computer interface
Joris Peels of i-materialise, the global manufacturer of 3D printers
Augmented reality researcher and founder of Layar Maarten Fitzgerald

They are also running a Twitter campaign to help build buzz about their event -- winner gets a ticket to TEDActive 2012!

Anyone who tweets #tedxkids will be entered for the live drawing taking place on June 1st. And the more #tedxkids tweets attributed to you (retweets count) the higher your chances of winning -- the winner will be announced at the end of the event.

 

Learn more about TEDxKids@Brussels at their website.