School Tech Awards 2026: best school projects honoured by Siemens

"We are in the midst of a new industrial revolution: that of artificial intelligence, and you have in your hands the tools to create the future," with these words Floriano Masoero, CEO of Siemens Italia, addressed the students at the School Tech Awards 2026 awards ceremony, held on 3 June at the Dalmine Foundation. The international competition, promoted by Siemens, takes up the legacy of the "Automation Championships", which since 2009 have involved over 17,000 students, 700 projects and 300 schools. The event aims to highlight the best school projects in the field of industrial automation, digitalisation and technologies for the future of industry.

This year's edition saw the participation of over 80 projects and 36 finalists from Italian and international Technical Institutes, Professional Institutes, CFPs and ITS Academies, including the Salesian Don Bosco Institute in Cairo, winner of the 'Foreign Award'. Among the projects presented, the watchwords are AI, robotics and energy efficiency, with a high level of technological integration and industrial applicability. In the 'Professional' category, first prize went to the CNOS FAP Rebaudengo of Turin, which developed a plan for revamping a pallet handling system with automated cleaning and intelligent control. Also from Turin are the students of the Istituto Agnelli, first place in the 'Technical' category with their 'Autopack' project, a compact packaging machine integrating advanced automation and 4.0 technologies. Finally, in first place for the 'ITS Academy' category is the ITS Academy Udine with 'MoveDeX', a cyber-physics platform integrating AI, artificial vision, robotics and virtual reality.

The event opened with a dialogue between Floriano Masoero and Marcello Albergoni, Country Manager of LinkedIn Italia, about the role of companies at a time of great technological change. One of the revolutions already underway, according to Albergoni, is the transition from a job title-based labour market to a skill-based one: in the age of automation, companies are also increasingly looking for human skills such as curiosity, courage and creativity. "Human beings will not cease to be important, but rather will be at the centre more than before," adds Masoero, "there will always be a need for creativity and people who coordinate creativity. As far as the global race for artificial intelligence is concerned, the CEO of Siemens Italia maintains that there are still opportunities for our country: 'There are some areas, such as large language models, where we are lagging behind, but there are others where the game is still open. Italia is the second largest manufacturing power in Europe and has a rich fabric of SMEs and great industrial skills. We have the opportunity to train specialised AI models for industrial applications like few others in the world'.

"We truly believe that schools are one of the fundamental ecosystems of a country's growth," Masoero continues, recalling the spirit in which the School Tech Awards were created. "For us it is an investment in the future. Never before has there been such a need for skills that are not only technological but also relational, as we have seen in the student working groups that have developed the projects. What we are trying to tell the students is this: innovate because we have the skills and abilities to continue to be leaders'. According to Masoero, moreover, the skills required by the market today are many more than those currently offered by schooling, so we must continue to insist on bringing education and companies closer together. "The modern leader must be a connector: between technologies, between people, between different sectors. We Italians have been used to connecting ideas for centuries, so with this new industrial revolution we can only grow'.

The School Tech Awards initiative is one of the highlights of Siemens' Education Programme, which has been promoting dialogue between education and industry for over twenty years with courses for teachers, certifications and workshops. This is also one of the objectives of the recent 4+2 reform of the Ministry of Education and Merit, which provides for four years of secondary education, followed by two in the Its Academy. "The Education programme is a crucial part of our strategy, management is investing more and more," says Raffaella Menconi, programme manager for Italia. With regard to the possibility, suggested by Minister Valditara, of equating technical and vocational institutes with high schools, Menconi explains: "We aim to enhance the different profiles: professional figures, for example, will be increasingly important and will have to understand how to interact with constantly updated technologies.