Toni Pérez starts, together with the Orange Foundation, the first GarageLab in the Valencian Community in the IES Beatriu Fajardo in Mendoza

The Orange Foundation and Benidorm City Council have presented today, at Beatriu Fajardo de Mendoza Secondary School, the first GarageLab centre in the city, which is also the first classroom of this initiative that is inaugurated in the Valencian Community. The event was attended by the mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez Pérez; the Councilor for Education Maite Moreno, the territorial director of Institutional Relations of Orange, Armando López Benítez, and the director of the IES Beatriu Fajardo de Mendoza, José Pérez Sellés.

GarageLab is an initiative of the Orange Foundation aimed at students with difficulties in adapting and making use of the traditional educational system and aims to reduce the dropout rate, increase student motivation and promote the improvement of their academic results. The initiative is developed through a digital manufacturing environment and using the maker culture, whose application in the educational process has reduced the dropout rate by more than 13% and increased student motivation by more than 62%.

After learning about the project, the mayor of Benidorm congratulated both the IES Beatriu Fajardo, "for presenting this project, which has excited so many and recovered training opportunities", and the Orange Foundation, "for having created this proposal that increases the motivation, achieve academic results and bring digital spaces closer to educational centres”.

Toni Pérez was pleased that the project is linked to issues of "innovation, technology and universal accessibility, which are three of the main points of the Smart Tourist Destination that we are", pointing out that "it is a satisfaction to see how they also converge in this educational project ”, already grateful to the teachers and especially to the students for their involvement in the project that “brings benefits and opens up opportunities by bringing out talent, enabling an opportunity for training, integration and inclusion”.

After talking with students, teachers and representatives of the Orange Foundation, the mayor visited the centre's inclusion initiatives and the GarageLab technology classroom, the first in the Valencian Community, in which he highlighted that " Beatriu Fajardo secondary school project persuaded by its quality and commitment to improving society”.

At the event,  For the Orange Foundation, Armando López, territorial director of Institutional Relations of Orange, highlighted "the importance of providing young people, and especially those with greater integration difficulties, with the necessary tools to be able to successfully face the future challenges posed by the digital revolution. We are very proud of the balance of our GarageLab project in this sense, with increasingly motivated students and excited and challenging teachers. We are convinced that GarageLab is the transformation that Spanish classrooms needed so that the boys and girls who occupy them gain in employability, competitiveness and productivity, adjusting to the increasingly demanding requirements of the labour market”.

And the director of the IES Beatriu Fajardo de Mendoza, José Pérez Sellés, has been convinced that “GarageLab is the answer to that new way of educating that we have been looking for for a long time in our centre. We wanted to find a new and different way of working so that students learn more and better; to reduce the borders between levels, in order to favour the training of those students with greater learning problems and that the most advanced feel useful as an example and reference for their peers; so that our students with special educational needs are even more visible through the mix of times and learning spaces. In short, team up and that students are participants and protagonists of their education. The GarageLab project will mark a before and after in the transformation of the educational model”.

The students are creating in the GarageLab financed by the Orange Foundation, specific posters for the centre to be interpreted by autistic people and in braille writing and in 3D printing of archaeological pieces for universal accessibility environments.