PROMYANATA (The Change) is about modern education for Bulgarian children!
The mission of Nikolai and Victor from “Active History Map” is to modernize history and geography education for Bulgarian children and youth and stimulate their curiosity and interest in historical and geographical knowledge. The foundation offers educational content in line with the modern technological development and needs of children and youth.
Nikolai has a law degree and is the founder of the foundation, while Victor is a cartographer and an expert in geographic information systems, who is creating the maps and data visualizations.
The idea was born in 2015, when Nikolai was on a hike in the mountains to see the difference between the border between Bulgaria and Turkey back in 1912 and today, but was unable to find any useful digital and modern content. Then he decided to create this content himself since he was already interested in history and geography.
Realizing there was no digital map whatsoever in history and the way this influences the education of children and youth, Nikolai started to recruit a team, look for adequate technical solutions, funding, etc. The paper maps and atlases are often neglected by Bulgarian children, and the absence of any connection between the image of the map and the educational material makes educational content uninteresting and harder to understand.
The foundation's mission is joined by a team of historians, cartographers, a GIS expert, an IT expert, and an artist.
The Active History Map Foundation creates modern digital educational maps freely available online for Bulgarian children and youth, reflecting the time expressions of events. Modernizing educational technologies is critical for the quality of education in Bulgaria, and the digital era now affects every field of public life. The education of children and youth should not lag behind this trend.
PROMYANATA (The Change) they seek to achieve:
The “Active History Map” Foundation aims to help Bulgarian children and youth learn with interest and understanding by modernizing educational content in the field of history and geography. This is achieved through modern history maps that correspond to the official learning material and the natural rise of digital technologies in our lives.
Maps are available freely online for all children and youth between the second and the 12th grade, as well as for university students. They allow users to choose a timeframe and the map changes accordingly, where each change in the map is accompanied by a text providing information about the respective events.
Digital maps systematize a big amount of information and make it easily available via the Internet. Information on the maps is easier to assimilate, because texts are accompanied by images. Thus, historical and geographical knowledge become more interesting and more popular among students. The most curious among them can download scanned books and materials related to the created maps.
An existing map can be upgraded and updated constantly. This is valid for the map itself, and for the materials attached to it.
Currently, there is no other organization in Bulgaria producing digital maps on history and geography. So far, the Active History Map Foundation has created five online maps and is working on 10 more.