Andrea Morachioli, 17, is an IT student at IIS G. Marconi in Civitavecchia (Rome). Last summer, he discovered the Phyrtual Innovation Gym and attended a course at the Game Lab with his class. And since that day, he had no longer abandoned the Phyrtual Innovation Gym!
Andrea helped as a digital coach at the International Hackathon for Civic and Social Innovation, participated in the call by artist Lino Strangis for the Media Art Festival Contest and proved to be an excellent teacher for young students and peers: a true coding maestro, even at the recent “Hour of Code,” promoted by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale together with Microsoft and De Agostini.
At the Phyrtual Innovation Gym, Andrea is very successful as a Coding Coach, both with younger students and his peers. Andrea is comfortable with Microsoft environments too (and dreams about working there after graduating) and has provided strategic support for Programme Future Recoded and Project Crack the Code, helping other young students to understand the importance of digital skills.
"I feel that technology is freedom," he explains. "Freedom and responsibility". And these are not just catchy phrases for Andrea, they are choices he has made with great awareness, notwithstanding his young age.
Andrea, in fact, is also co-founder of ARSol Technology, now transformed into "Work In House".
"The objective is to form a team that can code useful items inexpensively,” Andrea explains. The first product developed by his team, which can be applied to any shoe, allows users to listen to music through Bluetooth earphones, calculate the distance and speed walked or run, calculate how many calories have been burnt, and even provide useful pointers on training… basically, “all the functions required for running and training in a single app.”
Andrea and his four partners in this enterprise have not only developed these "Total NFC Shoes." They are also working on low-cost alarm system and developing tutorials to explain technology on YouTube.
The story of student, start-upper and coding maestro Andrea: “I’m not just a nerd. I believe technology is freedom.”
