A new National Education Campaign for Schools titled ”Teaching Intellectual Property is Funny” was launched on 3rd September, at Ungheni school ”Ion Creangă”. The event was organized in the context of the beginning of the school year and gathered together AGEPI and EU Delegation representatives, teachers, pupils and parents.

During the event, team leader Maximilian Foedinger and AGEPI representative, Andrei Moisei, held a lesson on intellectual property and respect for copyright. They explained to the pupils what intellectual value means, how can protect it and capitalize, how to determine its price, and encouraged them to be creative and inventive. The pupils also received a set containing 3 teaching materials (comics) on IP topics: “Patents”, “Trademarks” and “Copyright”.

The Project intends to participate in the Campaign by supporting the publication of teaching materials sets, namely 85,000 comics of each topic (“Patents”, “Trademarks” and “Copyright”) with a total number of 255,000 copies. The teaching comics will be distributed during the 1-hour lessons on Intellectual Property Importance provided in each institution.

At the first stage, during September – November 2018, the Campaign will be implemented in around 100 pre-university education institutions from the North and South regions of the Republic of Moldova, with Romanian teaching, where at least 20,000 pupils from the V to IX grades will be trained.

During 2019, within second stage of implementation, the planning is to conduct the Campaign in over 300 pre-university education institutions from all regions of the Republic of Moldova (North, Center and South regions), focused at least on 60,000 gymnasium pupils, Romanian speakers.

The distribution of comics will be done during the academic year 2018-2019, starting with September 2018, by the AGEPI with the support of Ministry of Education, Culture and Research, and the Project. AGEPI will be responsible for the distribution of the publication to 400 schools in the framework of the open lessons on IP subjects, based on the list of educational institution put at the disposal by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research.

The Project participated with their expertise in the IP training course for the school-teachers and initiated the development of model lessons on IPR importance in schools for encouraging creativity, science, business and to arouse interest to IPR field.

The main objective of the Campaign is to inspire children about innovation and creativity and raising the level of IP education. At the same time, this activity will contribute to the formation and development of the young generation creative imagination and intellectual capabilities, from an economic, social and cultural point of view.

The EU Project ”Support to Enforcement of the Intellectual Property Rights” in the Republic of Moldova is funded by the European Union and implemented by a Consortium of Archidata LLC (Italy), European Profiles S.C. (Greece) and Business and Strategies in Europe (Belgium). The project has a duration of two years and ends in November 2018.