An exterior view of Samsung Electronics Italia’s headquarters in Milan.

Today, Samsung Electronics launched Samsung Newsroom Italy, a new Italian-language media channel that will provide local media and consumers with all the latest news and information about the company.

Samsung Newsroom Italy is the go-to site for updates on Samsung’s activities in the country, as well as its latest innovations and services, and insight on its corporate vision. The newsroom will offer a wide range of engaging content, including feature articles, infographics and high-definition photos and videos.

Samsung Newsroom Italy is the fourteenth newsroom that Samsung has launched, following the Global newsroom, as well as local editions in the United States, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, India (both in English and in Hindi), Germany, Russia, Mexico, the U.K., Argentina and Malaysia.

Samsung established its presence in Italy in 1991 and has since become a key driver of the consumer electronics market’s growth. Samsung Electronics Italia (SEI) is committed to fostering a culture of innovation in the country, in order to highlight the benefits that such a culture ultimately delivers to consumers’ lives.

For more information on Samsung’s activities in Italy, please visit Samsung Newsroom Italy at news.samsung.com/it.

The European Coding Initiative will play a central role in a number of Europe-wide projects to promote the education of coding and computational thinking, including EU Code Week.

To mark the partnership with the European Coding Initiative, Samsung hosted a demonstration class at EU Code Week’s All You Need Is Code event in Brussels on October 12. Children from the Coding Masters program in Poland were on hand to present a class and show the adults how it’s done!

Sangwoo Kim, President of Corporate Affairs for Samsung Electronics Europe said, “Our vision is a world where digital making is a basic skill for every young person in Europe, along with math and literacy. We live in an increasingly digital world, and teachers and schools need to be equipped to support the transition to a connected society. We want to give young people the opportunity to be creative and to experience the joy of digital making through coding, robotics, electronics and app development.  With confidence, the new generation can become creators of the digital world, not just consumers of it.”

Here is an overview of Samsung’s activities during EU Code Week:

• Germany: On October 10, the winning projects of the Code Week Award were broadcast to the main opening event for Code Week in Berlin. Samsung Electronics GmbH and Gesche Joost, EU Digital Champion, initiated the Code Week Award, a prize honoring the motto “Every Week is Code Week.” As part of the competition, 700 young people in eight different cities participated in workshops and hackathons.
• U.K.: Samsung will be opening its fifth Code Club Hub in the U.K., offering free after-school coding clubs for children at community centers in need of technology support. Samsung has been a partner of the Code Club since 2013, also supporting the recruitment and training of volunteers to help sustain these free provisions.
• Italy: Samsung Italy is hosting coding lessons at the Samsung Smart Area in Milan. On Tuesday, October 13, the results of research managed by Cattolica University of Milan on the impact of coding on students and teachers were revealed. For anyone planning to visit the Milan Expo 2015, Samsung will offer coding lessons at the Samsung TIM open space.
• Poland: Samsung Poland is supporting the Polish edition of Code Week as a main partner and is organizing nearly 500 events connected to the Coding Masters program across Poland. The official opening of Code Week Poland took place in the National Audiovisual Institute. Samsung also supported the organization of the Coders’ Picnic at the Copernicus Science Center.
• Norway: Samsung is a partner of Laer Kidsa Koding and its 50 code clubs will have events throughout Code Week, including a robot workshop at the University of Oslo, Code Club at Tekna in Oslo, Girls Coding Day and an Edtech day for teachers.
• Finland: MehackIT is publishing blog posts of interviews with students in Lahti schools in Finland. The blog posts share experiences from students taking MehackIT coding, robotics and electronics classes.
• France: On October 14, Samsung employees ran two workshops, which both hosted 25 children to introduce them to coding.  Samsung France launched Campus Junior, a free online coding course for children between 7-13 years old, in May 2015.

Stay tuned for more stories from Samsung about coding.

For general updates, follow @NeedCodeEU.

As described in our previous article, the PEN.UP app helps artists everywhere—both professional and aspiring—connect and share their creations with the world. It’s an easy and versatile app that provides a wide range of tools to help curate, tag and share your artworks, and it especially works well with Samsung’s S Pen and large-screen devices like the Galaxy Note5 and Galaxy Tab S2.

Now let’s take a look at PEN.UP in action, seeing how real people around the world have used the artistic app to rich their lives and the lives of those around them.

Finding Friends to Turn Around a Bad Day

For the PEN.UP user who goes by the name “CandikaneBlack,” the sharing part of the app helped get her through a tough time. She was having a sad birthday, so drew a cartoon of how she was feeling, then asked people in her PEN.UP network to add themselves to her picture. The results were overwhelming. Dozens of people from all over the world joined in, adding images of themselves encouraging, playing with and sharing joy with CandikaneBlack, turning a sad day into one of happiness and warmth.

Drawing Around the World

PEN.UP has been attending various events by Urban Sketchers, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging people everywhere to draw the world around them. As a sponsor, PEN.UP has joined in Urban Sketcher events in Paraty, Brazil, and Singapore, showing how aspiring artists can use the S Pen and Samsung devices to capture the landscape with drawings, and then share their art with everyone.

PEN.UP also attends book and events, offering lectures and lessons on how artists, publishers and others can use PEN.UP to open new opportunities professionally. Here, PEN.UP comes to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, in Bologna, Italy, and the Mobile Digital Art Summit in Palo Alto, California.

You’re Never Too Old to Learn New Things

In Korea, 70-year-old Ik-soo Son had never studied art, but after he taught himself how to draw using his smart phone, he became a minor celebrity, inspiring many with his story. These days, Mr. Son enjoys showing others how to make art using tablets and smartphones, just as he has done.

And You’re Never Too Young

The popular Korean artist Min-soo Kim (commonly known as miyune) also likes to show people how to make art using their tablets and other devices. PEN.UP and compatible apps are so intuitive using the S Pen to make art, even children can enjoy these apps quickly and easily. In this video, Kim teaches schoolchildren how to make robots, monsters and other cool creatures using the Sketchbook Pro app. After just a short introduction, soon these kids are making weird and wonderful cartoons, anything their imaginations can think of.

Whether using a Galaxy Note5 or a Tab S2, PEN.UP is a great way for people all over the world to use the S Pen to share their creativity. After all, what’s an artwork without a gallery? Thanks to PEN.UP, everyone now has access to an international gallery, all day, every day. This is just one more example of the customer-centered approach Samsung Electronics always focuses on, empowering users to connect and express themselves in the way that’s just right for them.