November 3, 2026 - Fastweb + Vodafone is partner for training on digital skills in the “Gianfranco De Martini” Scholarships project of the Don Gino Rigoldi Foundation. The Foundation's mission is to promote the social and labor inclusion of young people and minors at risk of marginalization, and the “Gianfranco De Martini” Scholarships offer educational and economic support to deserving young people from the penultimate year of high school and up to the achievement of a Bachelor's degree. Starting from November 7, Fastweb + Vodafone will hold four lessons on artificial intelligence, offering 15 students concrete, interactive and gamified training. The training course offered by the company also includes the testimony of an employee who is an expert in artificial intelligence and a guided tour of STEP FuturAbility District, the technological space for scientific dissemination in Piazza Adriano Olivetti 1 in Milan.
The training course
Fastweb + Vodafone will provide a course divided into four meetings of two hours each, structured to maximize the possibility of using the platforms: students will use artificial intelligence to understand artificial intelligence itself and achieve educational objectives.
The first meeting aims to build a shared vocabulary on generative AI, understand how technology works - how language models are trained and how they 'reason' - and develop a critical sense of how artificial intelligence works and the risk of hallucinations. A survey will reveal the real skills already acquired related to artificial intelligence and the expectations for its use, so that the second and third meetings can be calibrated accordingly. The second lesson will therefore aim to contextualize AI in the present, describing its successful applications and concrete impacts, and provides an overview of the most used programs for conversation and reasoning, coding and vibecoding, images and videos, research. In the third lesson, the possible and constructive uses of AI in study and work will be illustrated. The fourth and final meeting aims to explore some of the ethical, ecological and political issues, so that students can develop their own informed and critical point of view on this technology.
The training course designed by Fastweb + Vodafone also includes the intervention of an employee who is an expert in artificial intelligence who will explain how this technology is used every day in the company, and a guided tour of STEP FuturAbility District, the technological space for scientific dissemination where you can experience the current digital transformation. STEP FuturAbility District is located in Milan in Piazza Adriano Olivetti 1 and since the end of May 2022 — the date of its foundation — more than 130,000 people have visited it and taken part in its scientific activities, such as workshops, educational activities for schools and free Sunday workshops dedicated to children and their families.
“For Fastweb + Vodafone it is a privilege to be able to support a reality such as the Don Gino Rigoldi Foundation, which, thanks to decades of direct presence in the most difficult contexts of the city, is attentive to those in difficulty and in particular to young people and minors from every country, ethnicity, language and culture. The training course that we offer to the Foundation's students is a further testimony of Fastweb + Vodafone's commitment to making fundamental digital skills accessible and understandable, especially to young people, so that they can become aware citizens and have the necessary tools to seize opportunities and overcome the challenges that life will bring them,” said Anna Lo Iacono, Head of ESG at Fastweb + Vodafone.
“Artificial intelligence represents a profound transformation that brings with it great opportunities, but also complexities and risks that we cannot ignore,” said Pierfilippo Pozzi, Director of the Don Gino Rigoldi Foundation. “This is why it is not enough to teach children to use these tools: we must help them to know their limitations and implications. We particularly appreciate that this path explicitly and critically addresses the ethical, ecological and political issues of AI. Only by developing autonomous thinking and deep awareness will our young people be able to govern technology instead of suffering it, transforming merit and study into a real opportunity for emancipation and social redemption. The collaboration with Fastweb + Vodafone on the “Gianfranco De Martini” Scholarships project goes exactly in this direction.”
Fastweb + Vodafone's commitment to the dissemination of digital skills
The collaboration with the Don Gino Rigoldi Foundation is part of a broader Fastweb + Vodafone strategy to contribute to the dissemination of digital skills among citizens, so that everyone can seize the opportunities offered by digitalization. It includes the Fastweb Digital Academy, the Fastweb + Vodafone school for digital professions, which provides a wide selection of courses to expand access to digital training in Italy and strengthen the skills of workers and workers. Since its inception in 2016, Fastweb Digital Academy has reached more than one million and 380 thousand participants in its free training courses open to everyone, has provided more than 1,800 live-streaming courses and has produced 190 video courses that are always available online. And LV8 is also part of it, the learning game developed to acquire concrete digital skills defined according to the European DigComp3.0 framework. Launched in June 2021 to involve young people who do not study and do not work (the so-called Neet) in digital training courses, LV8 is now aimed at high school girls and boys to bridge the digital skills gap, with particular attention to those who are most at risk of exclusion. In the current school year, alongside Fastweb + Vodafone in secondary schools, there are two partners: Next Level, which last year trained more than 8 thousand girls and boys with LV8 - Future Mission; and Gi Edu, the division of Gi Group that creates concrete connections between schools, universities, post-diploma alternatives and the world of work, which has chosen to enrich its training offer with LV8 and with lessons based on the learning by doing methodology dedicated to Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Fake News at the time of AI.
STEP FuturAbility District is also part of Fastweb + Vodafone's commitment to promote the digitalization of the country, making the digital skills essential to face future challenges accessible and offering all citizens the opportunity to learn about and understand emerging technologies.