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Projects

Designing the Future

01.03.2022-01.03.2024

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of skills such as decision-making, digital literacy, critical thinking, creative problem solving, and adaptability for students. Nevertheless, technology has mainly been used for consumption, leading to a generation of young people that mainly uses it for social media and/or games. This project aims to raise awareness about this phenomenon and promote digital literacy, coding, and 3D printing in education, not only for students, but also teachers, parents, and decision makers. Through partnerships with 12 countries, the project strives to enrich teaching and learning processes and enhance students’ scientific and analytical thinking skills. One of the biggest obstacles towards achieving this goal is the lack of qualified tutors. Therefore, this project serves to demonstrate that different digital tools can be learned fairly quickly by tutors with little-to-no digital literacy and applied in classrooms in different areas to enhance students’ motivation and promote their learning in a more dynamic and entertaining fashion.

More specifically, all partners participated in producing short educational computer programs based on the Scratch programming language, with e-materials for various school subjects for high school students aged between 15 and 18 years. It is noteworthy to say that adaptation of these materials to students belonging to other age groups is straightforward. The main goal of the produced material is to show that the produced material can be used in schools to serve students’ needs and desires, since, to the best of our knowledge, there is no similar material officially used in educational systems across Europe. The produced material includes

Where some of these materials are translated to Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Turkish languages.
These materials are the fruit of several Learning, Teaching, Training Activities (LTTA) realized throughout the project lifetime. Chronologically, the LTTAs include the first online meetings held in July, September and October 2022, the meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, from 21.11.22 until 25.11.22, the meeting in Antalia, Turkey, from 05.12.22 until 09.12.22, the meeting in Rome, Italy, from 23.01.23 until 27.01.23, and the meeting in Helsinki, Finland, from 12.06.23 until 16.06.23.

Besides these events, two short-term student exchanges were executed throughout the course of the project: 1) from 15.10.2023 until 21.10.2023 in Krakow, Poland, with a participation of 44 students and 2) from 03.12.2023 until 09.12.2023 in Narva, Estonia, with a participation of 24 students. These events offered superb opportunities to students to make friendships and relationships with students from different countries bust their self-respect and self-confidence. The high number of students and teachers/trainers that participated in the mobility activities and virtual meetings of the project is added value to the final outcome of the project. The main benefits for all project participants is that they gained innovative implementations, acquired problem-solving skills, understood better the importance of digital literacy/readiness, they had a strong interaction with their peers for future works and acquired practical knowledge and skills in coding and 3D printing.

Finally, the partners applied two questionnaires related with programming and basic digital literacy to both students and teachers at their institutions during the project lifetime. One of the main objectives of these questionnaires was to determine which staff members are the most interested and have experience and background in coding and 3D printing, assess their language and digital skills, whereas for students to get to know their learning difficulties, if they consider digital technology pertinent and useful in classes where they feel difficulties, etc.

Interestingly, most of the students that responded the questionnaire are female (60%) and none of the participants are digital illiterate (40% consider themselves to have basic, 40% moderate and 20% advanced computer handling), where 90% of them already heard about Scratch (70% have used it). The majority of them (70%) agree that this digital tool could be used to aid them in learning a particular subject/topic within a course, and they identified Mathematics, English, Physics, Chemistry, and History as the classes where they experience the most difficulties. Lastly, 70% of the participants think that Scratch (and/or other digital tools of the sort) could be useful for group project assignments and that they would dynamize and make classes more entertaining for them.

Regarding the teacher’s perspective, the participants presented a wide range of experience in teaching, ranging from 2 up to more than 20 years of experience. Their areas were also quite dispersed, going from natural sciences, through English (and other foreign) languages to the IT area. As in the students’ case, all participants consider themselves digitally literate (50% have moderate and 50% have advanced computer knowledge) and most of them know and have used Scratch already (62.5%). The majority of them thinks that this (and similar digital tools) can help them dynamize their classes and better capture students’ attention and they have identified quizzes (87.5%), group projects (62.5%) as well as dynamization and entertainment of classes (62.5%) as the main areas where digital tools could have the most impact in their classes.

Leading Partner

Szkola Podstawowa z Oddzialami Integracyjnymi nr 12, Kraków, Poland

Consortium

  • Learnmera Oy, Espoo, Finland
  • Ozel Yedisu Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi, Antalya, Turkey
  • MULTI ACT STD, Adana , Turkey
  • Narva Soldino Gümnaasium, Narva, Estonia
  • COFAC - COOPERATIVA DE FORMA ÇÃ O E ANIMA ÇÃ O CULTURAL CRL , Lisboa, Portugal
  • CIAPE - CENTRO ITALIANO PER L'APPRENDIMENT O PERMANENTE, Roma, Italy

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