Information & Communication Technology (ICT) and spatial literacy are essential in many professional and everyday activities. Spatial literacy, learning about and improving interaction with one’s surroundings, is an inherently trans-disciplinary competency transcending from STEM to social sciences and arts. Despite the omnipresence of geospatial and ICT technologies, they are still insufficiently integrated into current teaching practices in secondary schools. The key reason for this discrepancy is the lack of “out-of-the-box” solutions for teachers, which provide an engaging experience to pupils. Furthermore, ICT practices are not sufficiently integrated into standard curricula for secondary schools and into teachers’ education. This project establishes a sustainable strategic partnership that aims at integrating ICT and spatial literacy to secondary school education by (i) developing an out-of-the-box toolbox to educate children with better ICT and spatial skills to prepare them for the labour market, (ii) enabling secondary school teachers to teach ICT-based spatial literacy, (iii) integrating ICT-based spatial literacy in school curricula and developing a homogeneous vision of ICT education across all stakeholders (iv) disseminating these results across Europe. Three universities – University of Muenster in Germany, University of Aveiro in Portugal, and University of Jaume I in Spain - form the core of the strategic partnership, accompanied by partners of the educational sector - three secondary schools, four centres for teacher education, and three governmental institutions in all three countries - representing the stakeholders in our project. The associated industry partner Esri acts as technology provider. The strategic partnership will develop a toolbox - consisting of mobile apps, teacher education concepts with teaching materials for secondary school modules and materials for teachers’ training. Our principle method is to develop these tools together with the most important stakeholders: teachers and pupils as end-users, educational centres and governmental partners for the didactical and administrative perspective, and academic partners for the scientific perspective. The app “OriGami” trains pupils in spatial orientation and map-reading, while NavApps fosters wayfinding and navigation competencies. Both apps run on smartphones and make extensive use of geospatial technologies. Through gamification and collaboration we engage pupils and motivate them to play our educative games not only in class, but also with friends in their leisure time. As teachers’ lack of IT experience is often the bottleneck to use ICT in classrooms, it is important to include their perspective and take teacher education into account. Together with the teachers from the associated schools, we develop ICT-based concepts and teaching materials for intensive teacher trainings to enable and motivate teachers to include ICT into their class. Finally, we propose recommendations for future national/federal school curricula to governmental decision-makers based on the project experience to ensure integration of geospatial technologies in future curricula in an appropriate and targeted manner. The most important physical result of this project is a virtual platform, which provides access to all components of our toolbox for ICT-based spatial literacy for secondary schools: The mobile apps OriGami and NavApps, concepts and materials for classroom modules, and concepts and materials for teachers’ training. The major impact will be children training ICT-based spatial literacy automatically through playing our games. Teachers are supported to use IT tools in class to educate pupils with better spatial and ICT competencies. ICT is an area with great job potential for the future, but Europe is still not educating enough ICT skilled professionals. This project aims to be a role model for spatial and computer literacy education in Europe. The transnational set-up of this strategic partnership and the involvement of stakeholders at all levels enable us to propose policy recommendations, that help moving towards a joint European curricula fostering ICT and spatial competencies. For the dissemination of these outcomes, we establish a virtual platform to access the components of our toolbox free of charge. We provide interactive functionalities for interested teachers exchanging experiences and uploading their own materials for public use also after the end of our project. Implementing innovative techniques and education on the end-users’ side (teachers and pupils) is one side of the medal. This has to be accompanied by the administrative side. Therefore, another major impact of the project will be feeding decision-makers in education with recommendations for curricula for secondary schools and for teachers’ training, to be implemented by the governmental associated partners of the Consortium.
Information & Communication Technology (ICT) and spatial literacy are essential in many professional and everyday activities. Spatial literacy, learning about and improving interaction with one’s surroundings, is an inherently trans-disciplinary competency transcending from STEM to social sciences and arts. Despite the omnipresence of geospatial and ICT technologies, they are insufficiently integrated into current teaching practices in secondary schools. The key reason for this discrepancy is the lack of “out-of-the-box” solutions for teachers, which provide an engaging experience to pupils. The strategic partnership aimed at overcoming this shortcoming by developing suitable tools and teaching material. The project aimed at integrating ICT and spatial literacy to secondary school education by (i) developing an out-of-the-box toolbox to educate children with better ICT and spatial skills to prepare them for the labour market, (ii) enabling secondary school teachers to teach ICT-based spatial literacy, (iii) disseminating these results to pupils, teachers, educationalists and teachers students in Germany, Spain, Portugal, and across Europe. The three universities – University of Muenster, University of Aveiro, and University of Jaume - formed the core of the strategic partnership. To ensure the involvement of teachers and pupils in the development process, three secondary schools and four centres for teacher education joined the team. They acted as stakeholders, tested the software and pedagogical material during the development process and gave valuable feedback. Our associated industry partner Esri acted as technology provider. Main Results and Output: In this project, we developed a toolbox consisting of the mobile app “OriGami” and the app “NavApps”. Both apps run on smartphones and make extensive use of geospatial technologies. Through gamification and collaboration we engage pupils and motivate them to play our educative games not only in class, but also with friends in their leisure time. The mobile apps are open-source and publically available. OriGami is an outdoor game fostering spatial literacy through navigation tasks and thematic tasks. Teachers designing a game for their pupils could choose from different navigation tasks: A route-following task and a destination approximation task. Both navigation tasks trained pupils in map-reading and navigation skills. The thematic tasks could be adapted to the subject taught by the teacher. In our user tests, biology teachers lead their pupils navigate to particular trees on the school ground. Having reached the tree, pupils had to answer questions or solve tasks related to the tree species. OriGami allowed for interactive tasks where pupils experience the real-world phenomena in various different ways. The length and the complexity of the game could be adapted to the needs of the teacher and the pupils learning stage. NavApps is an indoor treasure hunting game. Spatial competencies were trained in all phases of the game: In the first and second phase of the game, pupils had to map the building and hide treasures within the building. This way they got to know basic knowledge about digital map representations and georeferencing of objects such as treasures. Map reading and map representations as well as the usage of digital mobile devices to data collection was the focus of this part of the game. In the third and last phase of the treasure hunting game, pupils had to search and find the hidden treasures. This part trained pupils in their wayfinding and navigation skills as well as the skill to orient themselves with maps. The University of Aveiro developed the teaching materials and tested both games in various different formats: teacher trainings as well as long-term and short-term trainings for pupils together with their teachers. These trainings gave us important information regarding the challenge that teachers’ lack of IT experience is often the bottleneck to use ICT in classrooms. We involved teachers from our associated schools to take their perspective into account and develop ICT-based concepts and teaching materials. Towards the end of the project, all three partners conducted teacher trainings in all countries. The results of the project were presented to the public in three launch events, in which we were able to attract a large number of people and potential stakeholders. Furthermore, we used conferences and workshops as events to communicate our results to the scientific community. Numerous scientific publications resulted from the project and attracted attention in our research groups developing games for spatial literacy education, We believe that, with this project, we reached our major goal of creating a toolbox with which (i) children can be trained in ICT-based spatial literacy automatically through playing our games and (ii) teachers are supported to use IT tools in class to educate pupils with better spatial and ICT competencies.