Adolescents grow up in a complex society with expectations from peers, family members, teachers, and municipalities, and with novel technological tools that are not always well integrated within existing networks. In addition, each new generation of adolescents has new challenges, inspirations, and ambitions. Young people of today may interpret social situations and societal challenges in a different way than previous generations. Yet, we expect that adolescents are uniquely equipped to be game changers for many large societal challenges such as social injustice and climate change. How can adolescents get the resources to be game changers for societal challenges in a complex world? This can be considered a ‘wicked problem’.
 
•        Welcome by Arwin van Buuren (Dean Impact and Engagement, EUR)
•        Getting to know each other
•        Keynote talk by Ron Dahl (Community Health Sciences, University of California Berkeley)

• Keynote talk by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Cambridge University)
• Interactive reflection: Defining the big questions

Participants will use conversation cards during lunch to continue working on the big questions from multiple perspectives. The aim is that by the end of the day, we have collaboratively defined the big questions with regard to adolescents as game changers for 21st century societal challenges.

Contributions to the needs of others have often been studied using experiments that balance the needs of self and others. How do adolescents divide resources with known and unknown (i.e. distant) others? Taking the perspectives of others, also unknown others, is critical for 21st century challenges that require collaboration and consideration of diverse others. This session will summarize studies suggesting that the adolescent brain is wired for social connections with targets that are personally important, as marked by relatively heightened neural sensitivity for close targets, and that interactions with socio-cognitive skills such as perspective taking may trigger adolescents to build broader societal connections and networks.
 
•       Lydia Krabbendam (Clinical, Neuro-, & Developmental Psychology, VU)
•       Suzanne van de Groep (EUR, Healthy Start Convergence)
•       Commentary by Martijn Janse (Lieve Mark)

Design thinking is a commonly used method in industrial design to decompose complex problems. We will address the need to redefine our scientific questions by embracing complexity and pinpoint the need for integrative transdisciplinary approaches. This complementary integrative method allows for a richer assessment of adolescent social development. During this part of the workshop, we will start with an introduction in design thinking (including human centered design) by industrial designers and define the complexity of the problem, which also serves as a master class in design methods. During an interactive session we will draw out the problem on wall paper and this will be a working place throughout the workshop.

• Susanna Osinga (MSc Industrial Design, TU Delft)
• Milene Goncalves (Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft)

Participants will explore Delft based on an inspiration tour. At different locations throughout the city, design activities will be performed to develop novel directions that emerged from the workshop “can adolescents be game changers for 21st century societal challenges?”.

Tech platforms have transformed opportunities for adolescents’ prosocial behaviors in several ways by reducing temporal and social barriers to help others, recording prosocial behaviors more permanently, and creating novel opportunities for engaging in prosocial behaviors. At the same time, there have been concerns about the influence of social media on adolescents’ wellbeing, and on how the spread of misinformation online may influence adolescents’ development. Nonetheless, our knowledge on this topic remains relatively limited, and future studies would benefit from focusing on a more profound understanding of adolescents’ online behaviors, including distinct types of online contribution behavior (e.g., standing up against injustice, ecofriendly behavior), what is needed for digital resilience, and how this affects developmental patterns in adolescence. This session will integrate several of the research lines that were discussed in days 1-3 and seek ways to integrate knowledge from tech platforms with existing scientific methods and approaches.

• Candice Odgers (School of Social Ecology, University of California Irvine)
• Ili Ma (Developmental and Educational Psychology, Leiden University)
• Commentary by Wouter van den Bos (Developmental Psychology, UvA)

• Susanna Osinga (MSc Industrial Design, TU Delft)

Participants will discuss a future agenda around the theme “Can adolescents be game changers for 21st century societal challenges”.