On 1 October 2026, 46 schools from across Lower Saxony came to the 42 Wolfsburg campus to collect their seals as a MINT-friendly school, a digital school, or both. MINT is the German word for STEM: maths, computer science, natural sciences and technology. We hosted the ceremony, and one of our own went home with a title too.
who came, and why.
The seals come from MINT Zukunft schaffen!, a national initiative run by the non-profit MINT Zukunft e.V. in Berlin, under the patronage of the Kultusministerkonferenz, the conference of Germany's education ministers. Schools apply of their own accord. An expert jury checks them against a list of criteria, and a seal is valid for three years. Around 2,000 schools in Germany hold at least one.
State Secretary Stephan Ertner from Lower Saxony's Ministry of Education handed over the certificates with Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel, who chairs MINT Zukunft e.V., and the partners Hohenloher, MEKRUPHY, Christiani, PHYWE and Moravia. Benjamin Gesing, the initiative's managing director, hosted.
According to the initiative, 125 schools in Lower Saxony now hold a valid seal, up from 100 three years ago. That puts the state among the fastest-growing in the country.
a school for adults, hosting schools for children.
It's a slightly odd pairing on paper. 42 Wolfsburg has no teachers, no classrooms and no pupils under 18. Our students learn to code by building projects and checking each other's work. But every engineer, scientist and programmer was once a schoolchild, and somewhere along the way a school made them curious about how the world works. The schools in the room are where that starts.
Max Reinhardt, CEO of Schools at 42 Wolfsburg and 42 Berlin, opened with a short talk on what 42 is, and guests could take a tour of the campus. In his speech he made a point any former pupil will recognise:
Begeisterung für MINT ist nicht immer selbstverständlich.
Enthusiasm for STEM isn't a given, in other words. It often depends on one person who sparks it. For Max it was a teacher in his final years at school who showed him how interesting science could be. He thanked the schools for training the skilled workers of the future.
julia, mint ambassador.
The afternoon also brought a title for one of us. Julia, Employer Relations and Careers Manager at 42 Wolfsburg and 42 Berlin, was named a MINT Ambassador. The title recognises her work bringing people into tech and making sure our students find employers who value them.
what the jobs will need.
Nobody knows which jobs today's schoolchildren will end up doing. We do know what those jobs will ask for: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and problem solving, alongside the technical knowledge. At 42 the hard skills and the human ones grow side by side, and the doors are open to anyone who wants a hand in shaping the technology around them. If that's you, it starts with the 42 Piscine.
Congratulations to every school that took a seal home, and thank you to MINT Zukunft schaffen!, Lower Saxony's Ministry of Education and all the partners who made the afternoon happen. You can read the initiative's press release, with the full list of schools, in German.
Photos: MINT Zukunft, Marcel Rohrbacher, Visuallab Wolfsburg.
42 Wolfsburg