This proposal presents a unique and therefore so far unrealized and highly innovative concept to aid integrate migrants or refugees into the local job market.In particular the individuals being integrated are young adults, mostly without any graduation or professional training, visiting the August-Griese-Berufskolleg (AGB) in Löhne. By being a higher-educating school strongly oriented towards technical subjects and an integrated secondary school, AGB intends to develop a novel teaching instrument based on the Arduino microcontroller system in order to demonstrate the power of microprocessor systems and digital electronics in a very descriptive manner. This instrument is going to extend the perspective of the immigrants to open their minds and shift their direction towards the local high-tech industry and even consider applications at these companies for industrial training. These actions will ultimately ensure the immigrants' ability to take care for themselves to finally unburden Germany's social systems and turn them into integrated members of our society.The main idea of the present project is that integration is only successful on starting at schools defining the basis of society which highlights the urgent need of new approaches to the current refugee crisis. We are very positive that this project will serve as a blueprint in order to be copied and therefore multiplied by other educational institutions.The fundamental functionality of the teaching instrument can be briefly summarized: The term 'teaching instrument' describes the totality of all comprising hardware components needed to exemplify the functionality of microprocessor systems to the refugees. The Arduino has the capability to control almost any external electro-mechanical machine after programming it. The students of the AGB are going to develop an external application for the Arduino within class mediated by the framework of a novel concept based on self-organized learning (=SOL, Dr. Herold). This application will also demonstrate the versatility of the underlying microcontroller system. Thus the fascination for a new field on the high-tech market is going to rise and new potentials on the job market will be discovered by the individuals to be integrated.From the pedagogical point of view, another great feature is that the students of the secondary-school serve as mentors who will teach the immigrated youngsters how to apply the developed instrument. In short: "Students teach students" is one main idea of this project. This concept stimulates the extension of the technical competences during activity-oriented classes as well as an increment in intercultural communication skills. In summary this project can be situated at the very heart of hot-topic EU-wide relevant issues.This proposal makes clear that the project is oriented around three fundamental pillars:1. The development of a teaching instrument as a pedagogical vehicle based on a microcontroller system.2. Students teach students: Commitment of secondary-school students as mentors for young people being integrated.3. Technology connects.The third component of the project is supported by the collaboration with a Swedish vocational school, Teknikum in Växjö, similar to the AGB. Based on the fact that Sweden faces the similar refugee issues as observed in Germany and also that the Teknikum nicely complements the AGB by adding essential and project relevant contents in order to develop and evaluate the teaching instrument as a medium for successful integration. The main goal of this proposed collaboration program is to exchange experiences and methods gained and developed using the instrument to prepare and finally to integrate immigrants into the local job market. The Teknikum in Växjö is characterized by extraordinary competences in the fields of design and the development of technical applications whereas the AGB is one of the leading institutions on digital electronics and the development as well as the basics of microprocessor systems. In this sense the AGB is going to provide the project (the project partner) with the necessary (electro-)technical knowledge on microprocessor systems. In return, the Teknikum is going to provide the project (partner) with its ability to build mechanical components to finally make the teaching instrument perceptible and look useful.Among other things small project teams consisting of German and Swedish students are going to be formed within the framework of the project to work in parallel on the development of the teaching instrument as well as to increase the work performance and intercultural communication. Results and progress will be published online via a web application being developed. Meanwhile at both schools cultural and sociological aspects of migration will be discussed in detail in class.Finally the students to be integrated get to know the newly developed instrument during an intense project phase in close collaboration.
Introduction. The so-called refugee crisis in Europe of 2015 is the overall contextual setting of the project: Thousands of youngsters were on their long way to Europe seeking for a better and in particular safer future. Societies of receiving western European countries are now facing the challenges of integrating these visitors. As part of society, schools (such as the August-Griese-Berufskolleg, AGB) also do their jobs by establishing so-called international classes (IK) since early 2016 to educate the refugees in the German language at first place. As an upper secondary vocational college our second task is to deliver basic work-related skills to the displaced persons. As the AGB is strongly targeting the field of IT (information technology), a key branch of the future, there was so far no didactic concept available to motivate the fugitives approaching this sector of industry. Thus, one of the main goals of the present project in close collaboration with the Swedish Teknikum was the development of a simple didactic vehicle in order to teach the IT basics and especially the fundamentals of microcontroller programming in a funny and simple way. As we noticed, our didactic vehicle worked out fine in transmitting fundamental skills to the IK students at AGB. As the Teknikum in southern Sweden has been facing the same challenges in terms of integration by education, the european colleagues appeared to be the best choice as a collaborative partner. Similarly, in addition to a focus on computer science the Swedes also have a branch within their educational system mainly tackling handiworks. This implies that this was the ideal partner in order to construct suitable a chassis for the coming Arduino product. Prior to the construction and programming of the didactic arduino vehicle we had a long planning phase. During this meticulous planning the students involved in the project got in touch with each other via numerous skype meetings and several email correspondences in order to get to know their partners. In the daily lessons at school, the basics of programming and profound background knowledge on migration have been taught: Historical contexts, economic reasons as well as ethical challenges have been addressed. All these topics have been covered and structured by an extremely novel didactic concept called ‘Self-Organized-Learning’ (SOL) enabling the students to get their duties done in time. Besides the field trips happened in advance, the two encounters in November 2017 in Växjö (Sweden) and in March 2018 in Löhne (Germany) depicting the main activities of the project. On the first meeting, three didactic vehicles to deliver basic IT knowledge to the IK students have been constructed in an impressively short period of time (less than a week) by the project students. The second meeting was focussing the tutorial setting and the question of how to teach the IK students use and program the arduino constructions. During the same week also several day trips around the topic of migration and information technology have been conducted. Finally the German and the Swedish project students decided to use two very suitable arduino projects for their teaching lesson: A newly and from-scratch- developed ‘Tic Tac Toe’- game as well as a ‘Four in a row’ game fully programmed and electronically wired and also wooden chassis built. Also the entire game logics and winning conditions have planned and realized using their formerly learnt programming language. Our students managed to significantly and especially measurable increase and drag the interest of the migrant students towards IT. A large majority of the refugee students could easily imagine to enter the IT field after graduation. The didactic concept developed within the present project is absolutely suitable for other types of schools and can easily be adapted to their specific needs in terms of specialisation (eg. biology, psychology, social sciences…). In particular it is interesting for people who don’t know what to expect if they enter the field of computer science in High School preparing for university entry. We have finally developed a blueprint to successfully introduce a (almost any) complex topic to an audience which has absolutely no idea of. In case of the AGB, it is a matter of fact that the project results will be used in our daily classes for the next couple of years.