New forms of work have appeared, prompted by digital development that forces business and workers to be more open, more collaborative. Despite the ever growing need for STEM skills, fewer and fewer youngsters tend to go on with scientific or technical studies. This is a true challenge to fight unemployment in most countries of the European Union. Here, the Leze and the Catalunia territories, while being two distinct environments, both undergo a weaker and weaker economic and social situation combined with a lack of pupils' interest in scientific and technical subjects. Although youngsters are avid users of digital media, they often prove to lack genuine knowledge in the ability to use ICT. To improve this situation, the Lèze area as well as Catalunya have been involved for a few years in projects of creative and sustainable territories known as “ smart cities”. Today their ambition is to transfer this model to the school system, by inciting the whole educative community ( teachers, educative staff, pupils, parents, educators) to imagine a smart school for tomorrow The purpose is to experiment for a number of years a project which will create a serious game imagining a smart school. It will be carried out by and dedicated to youngsters, so as to experiment in local middle schools how to create and achieve digital projects able to answer the users' needs while requiring STEM skills and appealing to everyone's creativity. It is all about putting the pupil's inventiveness and imagination at the heart of the teaching process by turning middle schools into spaces of innovation and of production of think tanks. This project is called “Collaborative Design for Smart Pupils”. Six partners are involved, three in France and three in Spain: they are the community of “communes” of the Lèze valley; André Saint Paul middle school; the centre of scientific and technical culture of the Midi- Pyrénées region, Science Animation; the generalitat de Catalunya with its department of innovation and research, the Virolai middle school; the Everis foundation, which is specialised in the evaluation of public policies. This project will be carried on for 25 months, from September 2015 to September 2017. First it will consist in the conception, plannification and implementation of a study showing how the activities involved in the projects could influence the pupils' ambitions and self confidence as well as their taste for scientific and technical subjects. Then, teachers will be given special training to enable them to get used to the tools of digital creation. These training sessions will also offer them the opportunity to confirm the collaborative teaching strategies involved in the project and to plan the first innovation and digital creation workshops. The purpose of these workshops, which will be follow an iterative and incremental approach, is to lead the pupils to consider their school in a different way, by acknowledging all the various stakeholders and good practices at work there. While acquiring the necessary skills and abilities, the pupils will contribute to the creation of innovative projects adapted to their environment. During two creative school trips, the pupils will be dispatched into actual living labs dealing with their own projects. The whole experiment will be documented on a hosting collaborative platform ( wiki), which will act as a tool kit with datas, reports, videos, tips and assets during the production phase of the Serious Game. The main topic of this Serious Game will be the Smart School. In order to comply with the philosophy of the whole project, the pupils will be managed as if they were real professionals of the video game industry. They will have to specialize in some fields and to work in collaboration with each other to gather a broader spectrum of skills. Doing so, they will experiment the actual processes of the creation of a video game with the added benefit of an educative purpose. Ultimately, the project will result new ways of teaching STEM, based on digital tools and creativity. This multidisciplinary and trans national approach will reduce inequity in the access to knowledge and contribute to a better learning of the cognitive skills necessary to thrive in the complex conceptual universe of the digital world. The results will be published during two events dedicated to collaborative teaching practices “ IT World Edu” in Barcelona, and the Summer Lab in Lézat- sur- Lèze.
New forms of work have appeared, prompted by digital development that forces business and workers to be more open, more collaborative. Despite the ever growing need for STEM skills, fewer and fewer youngsters tend to go on with scientific or technical studies. This is a true challenge to fight unemployment in most countries of the European Union. Here, the Leze and the Catalunia territories, while being two distinct environments, both undergo a weaker and weaker economic and social situation combined with a lack of pupils' interest in scientific and technical subjects. Although youngsters are avid users of digital media, they often prove to lack genuine knowledge in the ability to use ICT. To improve this situation, the Lèze area as well as Catalunya have been involved for a few years in projects of creative and sustainable territories known as “ smart cities”. Today their ambition is to transfer this model to the school system, by inciting the whole educative community ( teachers, educative staff, pupils, parents, educators) to imagine a smart school for tomorrow. This 24-month project (September 2015 - September 2017), is an experimental project inviting the entire educational community of colleges (teachers, parents, educational staff, local authorities partners) to imagine innovations, technical, pedagogical, functional, for the college and the city, in order to adapt spaces to uses actually lived or "dreamed". By transforming the college into a space for innovation and the production of collaborative knowledge, the goal is to put the student's creativity and imagination at the heart of teaching, the citizen at the heart of digital innovation. This project is called “Collaborative Design for Smart Pupils”. Nine partners are involved, four in France and five in Spain: they are the community of “communes” of the Arize Lèze valley; André Saint Paul and François Verdier middle school; the centre of scientific and technical culture of the Midi- Pyrénées region, Science Animation; the generalitat de Catalunya with its department of innovation and research, the Virolai and Ernest Lluch middle school; the Everis foundation, which is specialised in the evaluation of public policies and The Social Coin enterprise. A first step of the project is to share a common culture of work around digital creation. This preliminary step is also an opportunity to validate the collaborative educational approach at work in the project and to program the first educational sequences of the digital innovation and creation workshops. The objective of these workshops, organized in an iterative and incremental way, is to invite the pupils to ask about their college and their city a new glance by taking into account the various actors and uses. Through the acquisition of skills and theoretical technical knowledge and experimentation, students invent innovation projects adapted to their environment. During two consecutive creative stays in Spain and then in France, students experience times of discovery and sharing on science as well as common creation times on their respective projects. All of this experience is documented and archived on the Social Coin collaborative platform and the project's website, a real toolbox composed among other things of methodological sheets and videos retracing the process and the results achieved. The creation of this platform encourages and facilitates transnational collaboration around scientific and technical projects aimed at improving the school and the city on the basis of creative challenges, and thus contributes to the emergence of a learning community in Europe. the European scale. Finally, thanks to the realization of an impact study, this project made it possible to measure the place of digital creativity in the school motivation of young people in favor of scientific and technical education. In the end, the project made it possible to experiment with a renewed teaching of STEM, basing it on digital technology and creativity. A multi-disciplinary and transnational approach that reduces inequalities in access to knowledge by improving the acquisition of the cognitive skills necessary to evolve in the complex conceptual world of the digital society. The results were disseminated several times during events dedicated to collaborative and digital pedagogical practices, "It World Edu" and "Social Internet Day" in Barcelona, and "Fab Lab ephemeral" in Ax-les-Thermes .