From the logbook
Active since 2011, six editions, over three hundred participants, more than sixty concepts built. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, so below you’ll also find the story behind them.
Two buses, eighty students, twelve hours
HZ University of Applied Sciences and JRCZ faced a twofold challenge: giving students a more concrete introduction to the chain they’ll be working in, and getting companies more involved in the work of the research group and the degree programmes. In collaboration with Dockwize, they have run a ChallengeBus with us three times. In the latest edition, eighty students, spread across two buses, boarded early in the morning for a day that wouldn’t take place on a campus. Along the way they visited companies in the protein transition chain, looking for opportunities to use seaweed, and spoke to people who normally only appeared in a course reader.
During this day we clearly saw that the concept scales very well. You can divide teams across companies and still hold on to the core of the expedition without any problem. In fact, because more people were involved, more insights came out of the interdisciplinary student teams. The students also started asking the entrepreneurs more and more questions the entrepreneurs hadn’t thought about themselves. Or the entrepreneurs asked the students questions that could be taken along. So everyone learned far more than they would have on an ordinary day.
“I don’t know what I want to do on Monday. This trip has proved to me that I can achieve so much more than I thought possible. I need to rethink my role.”