BEE CREATIVE is an initiative of the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth; it is coordinated by the Educational and Technological Research and Innovation Coordination Service (Service de coordination de la recherche et de l’innovation pédagogiques et technologiques – SCRIPT) and the National Youth Service (Service national de la jeunesse). Its aim is firstly to promote young people’s creativity, their talents, and their entrepreneurial spirit in the context of the new information and communication technologies, and secondly to enable them to find out how to create using technology and the new media.

As a result, makerspaces have sprung up in a number of secondary schools. These are places for discovery and creation, open to all (and not only to pupils at that particular school), where young people of all ages can carry out their own their digital projects themselves, with access to suitable equipment and professional assistance.

A number of makerspaces are in operation, including Base1 at the Geesseknäppchen Forum, the Creative Lab at the Lycée des Arts et Métiers in Luxembourg City, Cre8 at the Lycée technique in Esch-sur-Alzette, EM@B03 at the Lycée technique privé Emile Metz, the OpenWorksLab at the Sainte-Anne private school, and TryTestMake at the Lycée Schengen in Perl.

This first makerfest provided an opportunity to demonstrate the flurry of creativity that has developed in these makerspaces. There were about thirty workshops for children between the ages of 8 and 18, with more than a thousand registrations from children at fundamental schools, from secondary schools, daycare centres, youth centres and from families.

As well as offering an introduction to programming, robotics, and 3D printing, these free workshops also allowed to find out how to make a robot out of matchsticks, light-up Christmas cards or a computer hard drive.