Work Underway to Establish a Technology Education Centre in Sigulda

As work continues on developing the education infrastructure and improving the material and technical resources of Sigulda Municipality, substantive changes are also being introduced at all stages of education. To expand the range of opportunities and ensure that all pupils in Sigulda Municipality have equal access to technology education, a planning process has been launched to establish a Technology Education Centre in Sigulda.

To ensure the purposeful development of the Technology Education Centre, the “Sigulda Municipality Technology Education Development Strategy for 2021–2026” was prepared and approved at a meeting of the Sigulda Municipality Council on 17 December. It envisages beginning work on implementing the strategy as early as next year, gradually creating an innovation and education platform equipped with the latest technologies and a highly qualified team of experts providing a wide range of services for education, the public and the municipality.

The establishment of a Technology Education Centre would enable Sigulda Municipality to provide high-quality educational services, generate innovative ideas, develop high-value-added products and create engineering solutions to support businesses and the municipality. It is important to note that the strategy will be implemented in stages: a substantive foundation will be developed, educational programmes will be brought to life, and teachers will be trained, creating an interested and enthusiastic community of modern technology users that would subsequently occupy the infrastructure created for these functions.

The establishment of such centres in Latvia has followed a particular course: municipalities invest significant resources in constructing or improving premises, create a centre team, purchase technologies and begin implementing a technology-development direction within the particular municipality. In Sigulda Municipality, however, the centre will be developed in the opposite way. Initially, the foundation of the Technology Education Centre and technology enthusiasts will gather at the existing, well-equipped computer technology infrastructure of the Sigulda State Gymnasium’s methodological centre, while in the future a fully functioning institution will move to a location where an appropriate—and, importantly, purposefully developed—environment, the necessary technologies and intellectual resources have been gradually established.

Thus, as early as 2023, the Technology Education Centre would offer the latest modern technologies for implementing programmes related to information and communication technology (ICT) education, whose primary target audience would be educational institutions and general education teachers. At the same time, the centre would become a place that coordinates the resolution of issues and implementation of projects related to the development of ICT infrastructure in the municipality, cooperating with businesses, universities and other partners.

The establishment of such a centre is necessary primarily to ensure that all pupils in Sigulda Municipality have equal opportunities to study in an appropriate environment where investments in acquiring the latest technologies are brought together. Neither schools nor the municipality have the capacity to purchase and create fully equipped classrooms in every school with 3D printers or other printing equipment, CNC workstations and the necessary technologies, robotics kits, virtual reality laboratories and other equipment. Moreover, after the end of the school day, these facilities could be used both for extracurricular education and by members of the public to carry out and develop their own projects.

The Technology Education Centre is planned to offer the following areas: prototyping, 3D prototyping, work with cardboard and sheet materials, woodworking, metalworking, textile processing, large-format printing, electronics and media workshops, virtual reality and robotics laboratories, and others. Naturally, the foundation will be the study of computer technology and programming.

There is a need for such training not only in Sigulda but throughout Latvia, in order to rekindle pupils’ and the public’s interest in the exact sciences, promote education in the field of technology, and improve society’s ability to use computers and modern equipment.