“Neither of my parents finished high school.
We weren't poor, but we got very close.
We had a wrecked car, which they tried to steal twice, but they couldn't take it because it didn't have gasoline," Ignacio Gómez Portillo now recalls, with a hint of nostalgia, who spent his childhood with his five siblings in the department of Godoy Cruz, in Mendoza.
For Ignacio, the role of his mother was key and largely explains his current professional success.
She “she was a great person, that she liked to cultivate.
Life was hard for him, but he always said that
education is the difference
.
He told each of the five brothers:
'do what you want, how you want and when you want, but you won't not study.
And if you're not going to study, you don't do it in this house'.
It was the only rule we had
.”
Ignacio Gomez Portillo at the Balseiro Institute, in Bariloche.
It is clear that the maternal voice had some strength in the Gómez Portillo home, because
Ignacio received his Physics degree from the demanding Instituto Balseiro de Bariloche
(after receiving a scholarship), the older brother is now a doctor, the next is an administrator of companies, the next lawyer and the youngest nuclear engineer, also from the Balseiro.
an idea is born
In the case of Ignacio, curiosity and drive led him, after going through the Balseiro, to
do a master's degree in complex systems
.
That led him to study
society and human interactions
(is there a more complex system perhaps?).
To understand society, he studied
philosophy and social sciences
at the University of La Plata.
With all this in his backpack, he applied to do a doctorate at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and there he dedicated himself to
the theory of human cooperation
.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo defends his doctoral thesis at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
What's that?
Ignacio explains it this way: “It is a very old problem in science.
It turns out that human life and cooperation cannot be separated.
We are alive because we cooperate
, our health depends on it.
But in life there is also
natural selection and selfishness
.
So,
a contradiction
appears : that cooperation is the basis of life at the same time that egoism is the basis of the individual", he says.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo.
Physicist at the Balseiroy Institute, creator of an educational algorithm.
Rolando Andrade Stracuzzi
"Science seeks to resolve this paradox, to understand
which contexts foster cooperation in a framework of natural selection
. Conditions were found that, when they are present,
the best for you is the best for the other
," says physicist Gómez Portillo, who now, When asked by
Clarín
, he says that at airports, when they ask him about his profession, he says
"entrepreneur"
.
And what do we owe this for?
One fine day, when he had already returned from Barcelona to Argentina, he was researching at the Conicet and giving electromagnetism classes to 4th year Physics students at the National University of Cuyo, it occurred to him that everything he researched
on human cooperation could apply it to teaching.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo with his master's thesis director at the Instituto Balseiro de Bariloche.
He could do it if he could create a methodology that
incorporates the principles of the theory of cooperation
.
With the principles of cooperation
Thus, Gómez Portillo was giving shape to the new pedagogical method that -in a few words-
seeks for students to learn from the interaction between them rather than from the teachers
.
The methodology incorporates principles of cooperation in classes, such as
identity, diversity or reputation, among others
.
Initially, a teacher can teach a class, but the main learning processes occur when one student teaches another.
And that way he also learns.
These interactions generate knowledge and recognition among them
.
And that is what encourages the method.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo with his first students with whom he tests the cooperation teaching model.
“I started guiding my students towards the exchange.
Instead of me being the teacher standing on top of the stage, I would sit with them.
And I saw that this way, and using other principles of cooperation,
people were motivated and had better results in their learning
.
So I wanted to investigate this, and since I couldn't do it within the Conicet, I resigned and we opened an educational institute with my wife, who is a marketing specialist."
He says that they started with students who were doing the entrance course to Medicine.
“Yes, very specific, but it allowed me to develop the methodology well.
I was able to compare the results with other institutes that were doing the same thing and we saw that it worked better
”.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo in primary school.
The next step was
to transfer the teaching methodology to the virtual world
.
For that, he put together an education startup (Egg), which is based on what he called
the “human cooperation algorithm”
.
A platform that takes the principles of the pedagogical method.
With this system, which is expanding and is used by schools and educational programs, it has already trained
more than 250,000 young people in more than 10 countries
, especially in programming and other digital skills.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo in high school.
Most of them are professions that today are in great demand for work and are being increasingly chosen by students.
But Gómez Portillo says that the method can be used in all types of careers and subjects.
"It's content agnostic," he says.
“Today, new knowledge continually arises, which can be shared: many people want to know it, but there was no way to transmit it to everyone, because teachers of specific content are scarce.
On the other hand, there are very good courses, such as Coursera or others, but they are in the cloud without a teacher and although they can reach millions of people, almost 96% do not finish them.
We managed to unite massiveness with quality.
Our platform allows us to scale, have 100,000 or a million people
learning content with the same quality
”, says Gómez Portillo.
Ignacio Gomez Portillo receives the Sadosky 2022 award, along with his wife who is in charge of marketing the platform.
For his "innovative vision", Egg won the 2022 Sadosky Gold Award and last Friday he was the protagonist in Mendoza of the conference "Developing Local Talents to promote the future" organized by Argencon, the entity that brings together the main companies in the Knowledge Economy.
There, representatives of companies in the sector, provincial education ministers (such as those of Córdoba, Mendoza and Entre Ríos) and promoters of educational projects discussed the importance of education for job creation and economic development.
Conference "Developing Local Talents to promote the future" organized by Argencon in Mendoza.
-
Can this method be applied in traditional schools?
Clarín
asked
Gómez Portillo.
- It was our dream, but we saw that it is not possible in the entire system.
In fact, in Buenos Aires we transfer technology in 15 schools.
It worked, but it was unstable.
You put it on, it lasted a bit and then the teacher returned to teach with the blackboard.
What we understood is that it is useful to complement the traditional system.
For example, with the government of Mendoza we have an agreement so that students in the last years of secondary school can, against their turn, connect to learn to program.
The hidden benefit, the most valuable, is that it makes
people who would never meet meet
.
In this case, students from different social sectors.
This gives greater diversity and that improves the entire educational system, it is proven.
Gómez Portillo seeks to continue expanding his creation and this weekend he met Tim Draper, an investor in technology startups, in Uruguay.
If I had the chance to talk to his father, who recently passed away, I would simply say
"thank you
."
He tells that his father had many projects in the world of construction, but they did not prosper because "he did not take care of social relationships."
Paradoxes of life: today Ignacio continues to prosper and
he does so by relating people.
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