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The 'Superheroes school' is a unique state institution providing educational services to children in hospitals. It is precisely because of the school's uniqueness that none of the existing Ukrainian e-journals can meet all its needs - the existing ones do not have bedside teaching, timetables that can be adapted to medical procedures, state tutors who take into account not only state standards but also the child's individual health status, the time they can devote to learning, sincere hugs and many other aspects that cannot be included in the format of a regular school.

Volunteers from the OpenTech corporate charity programme, set up by employees of the IT company SoftServe, have taken on the task of helping to solve this extremely difficult problem - meeting the school's dizzying array of needs. As part of OpenTech, developers, project managers and other specialists have spent the last six months creating an incredibly cool e-journal project for the Superheroes School. At the same time, the development of such a large project from scratch will not cost the state a single penny - the specialists are helping the school on a voluntary basis.

"Working on a magazine with so many variables is a complicated process because there are so many aspects to consider. For example, the school has a pre-school group and a primary school, which means classes and lessons of different formats and lengths; there are different forms of teacher employment - full-time staff, including a practice psychologist who also provides counselling to parents; teachers under civil law contracts; and teachers are only allowed to work if they have passed a medical examination, which they do twice a year. The biggest challenge, however, is to take into account all the needs of each child - different times between treatments, different needs and opportunities to attend classes, the possibility of missing classes if the child's condition worsens, and attending with another group of students if the condition allows. However, we believe that we will manage this task and that the school will have a modern, high-quality product for the next school year,' says Nadiya Chaika, project manager.

"Work on development has been very active over the past six months. The work has involved not only the school's secretariat specialists, but also the heads and methodologists of the training centres. And SoftServe has engaged a whole project team of IT professionals who, as part of the OpenTech programme, are working on an incredible project that is very important to us on a completely voluntary basis. We meet with the volunteer team on a weekly basis, and for the first few months we met twice a week. We have also managed to get access to Diia to ensure organic integration with the platform in the future. We believe that in the near future we will start testing it on the ground and in the autumn we will launch it,' says Natalia Zhylinska, head of the state institution "Superheroes school".