We want to deal with the new challenges both students and teachers experience nowadays. By having them work together in mixed groups on joint subjects, and by incorporating the help of universities, high schools and commercial companies, by developing digital, language and social skills we want to orient the students towards an enhanced entrepreneurship in order to prepare them for their future studies and jobs. We will research the current situation of the well-being, living and working conditions in schools in the different countries involved. We will research the potential opportunities for young people of studying and working abroad with a view to promoting mobility within a united Europe. By enhancing the responsibility of the students for their own learning we want to promote leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity and life orientation in a process of mutual collaboration. The project will give the students the experience that working as an international team facilitates better results than working alone. We will promote problem-based learning: groups of students are given well defined tasks to solve; by establishing this project we will have students from different backgrounds and experiences (rural vs. city, countries with different teaching methods, school systems, history and background, different ways of coping with learning and behavioral disorders) meet and work together in an international context. Working across borders in mixed groups will be quintessential to this project, as its very aim is to step away from the classic teaching method to a more project-oriented open space . Amongst other things we will provide practical and realistic learning environments by including the students into the planning of a new school building for the Belgian partner school and by inventing a new type of wind turbine for the German partner school. The students will have to research the different topics involved in the project in all partner countries and then work together in transnational groups to set up a working plan for their field of focus. They will have to set up business groups and each group will focus on one aspect that directly corresponds to the building projects at hand. They will get support from professionals in the fields they are working on in order to complete their part of the project. Their ideas will be incorporated in the final stage of the school building and the wind turbine. The focus on MINT-skills and the incorporation of ICT in the approach to the project will further heighten the students’ focus on working in mixed groups towards a joint outcome, a system they will need a lot in their future studies and career. This new focus alters the role of teachers and the need for non-formal education furthermore corresponds to changed curricula and different approaches in focus in the different countries involved. As we are going to cover a variety of topics with different approaches from building models to setting up a business plan all students willing to take part can be included into the project regardless of their grades. We aim to increase their motivation for their daily work by exposing them to new ways of learning and working together. The students will experience the European dimension by working together with different people from different countries towards a common goal. Another positive impact is that they will learn about the culture of the host country - not as tourists do by watching from the outside- but as an integrated member of this society while living in the host family. The students will learn to cope with individual challenges and will gain a better understanding and responsiveness to social and cultural diversity. So their social skills will be developed in addition to the improvement of their language and digital skills. The teachers involved will get advanced training in corporate planning, terminology, marketing and digital competences, all of which they can disseminate amongst their colleagues and furthermore train others in their regular classes. The surroundings of the new school building in Belgium, built especially with a view to these altered teaching conditions, will focus on these new capabilities. Every country involved was handpicked because of their relevance in the project, so students will have to travel to Estonia for a deeper look into the sociological aspect, to Germany for their knowledge on the ecological side, to Scotland for their expertise with wind energy and the inclusion of the Queensberry Initiative in their curriculum, to Belgium for their many links with business life and to Hungary for their expertise in the field of languages and entrepreneurial skills. The number of the indirectly benefiting persons is quite high (2000) as the participants in the project will produce outcomes that will be used by the whole school communities e.g. the new school building (Belgium) and the wind turbine(Germany).
We have dealt with the new challenges both students and teachers experience today. One of our aims was to give students the chance to work together in mixed groups on joint subjects, so we strived for meetings of 3 schools if it was possible. We had a half term meeting with all schools and a final meeting, though unfortunately Scotland was unable to take part in that. We incorporated the help of universities and commercial companies especially in Belgium and Germany. Through different project tasks and time spent together we developed our students’ digital, language and social skills as well as oriented them towards an enhanced entrepreneurship and prepared them for future studies and jobs. We researched the current situation of the well-being, living and working conditions in schools in the different countries involved and researched the potential opportunities for young people of studying and working abroad with a view to promoting mobility within a united Europe. By enhancing the responsibility of students for their own learning, we hope to have promoted leadership, entrepreneurship, creativity and life orientation in a process of mutual collaboration. The project has definitely given the students the experience that working as an international team facilitates better results than working alone. All project meetings were built on problem-based learning: groups of students were given well defined tasks. Through these tasks we made use of the different backgrounds and experiences of the students such as rural vs. city, countries with different teaching methods and school systems. Working across borders in mixed groups thus was quintessential to this project, as its very aim was to step away from the classic teaching method to a more project-oriented open space. A core theme of the project was to include students in the planning of a new school building for the Belgian partner school. Different groups of students worked on this field, whose ideas were passed on to the planning authorities. We were assured that they were taken into consideration. Another focus was the invention of a new kind of wind turbine, which the students built with the help of professionals in the German partner school. The wind turbine is set up in the school grounds and it is used for recharging mobile phones. We had a special focus on MINT-skills and the incorporation of ICT in the project with a view to further heightening the students’ ability for working in mixed groups towards a joint outcome; a system we believe they will need a lot in their future studies and career. As we covered a variety of topics with different approaches from building models to setting up a business plan all students willing to take part were included into the project regardless of their grades. This approach increased their motivation for their daily work by exposing them to new ways of learning and working together. The students undoubtedly experienced European dimensions by working together for a common goal. Another positive impact, mentioned by a lot of students, is that they learnt a lot about the culture of their host country - not as tourists do by watching from the outside - but as a member of that particular society through staying with their host family. Nearly all students remarked that taking part in the exchange helped them to cope with individual challenges and gain a better understanding and responsiveness to social and cultural diversity. The teachers involved gained advanced training in corporate planning, terminology, marketing and digital competences, all of which they can disseminate amongst their colleagues and make use of in their regular classes. We made use of the special relevant competences that the schools involved could offer. The Estonian partner school has special knowledge in sociology, so students taking part in exchanges there looked into this aspect of a young person’s life. The impacts and consequences of the widespread use of social media has proved to be a field in which students were very much interested and involved, so this was also the focal point of work in some meetings in Hungary. The German school has special knowledge on the ecological side, moreover, they have professional expertise in metal- and woodwork, so the wind turbine project was central to meetings there. Scotland’s expertise with wind energy and the inclusion of the Queensberry Initiative in their curriculum has been made good use of during the meetings there. They hosted the half-term meeting where students presented both their national culture through music and dance and our interconnecting European culture through creating a ghost story together. The Belgian partner school’s links with business life and universities were utilised during their meetings, especially the final meeting. The Hungarian partner school‘s expertise in languages and entrepreneurial skills was used for the multilingual dictionary of the work done.