Our project involves 4 European preprimary and primary schools from Belgium, Spain, Finland, and Turkey. The project aims to explore, create and reflect on ICT and STEM skills by making pedagogically solid lessons of coding and robotics in order to enhance the creativity of all our pupils by exposing them to new ways of learning. Reaching 21th century and STEM skills will lead to increased motivation and self-confidence, the development of an emotional intelligence and consequently a better start for lifelong learning. The starting point to this project lies in the concern of the pupils motivation to learn. There is already 15 % school tiredness among the 11 years olds. School failure and absenteeism are the main immediate background for early school leaving, involving in most cases a job failure and exclusion. The primary school contributes to a qualified education , the key competencies and motivation for lifelong learning. The technological Literacy which is required in today's society, requires not only technical elements, but also should enable students abilities to access to future professional interests. That requires pedagogical skills from teachers as well as creativity how the new technologies and pedagogy are combined rationally.Therefore introducing the STEM skills in an early stage will help pupils to discover possibilities of wide range for their future studies. For teachers this future creates opportunities to work out a new, modern and rich way of teaching. Their role is to coach their students through the different, defiant assignments of this project. Teachers will increase their own vocational competencies by learning from their fellow and partner colleagues and use these experiences to encourage the whole school team to work in this new way of thinking and teaching through coding and robotics. The main output of our project will be the coding and robotics lessons. During the two years we will create together learning material that is tested and pedagogically valid. Firstly we will work on the coding games. How those will benefit mathematical, lingual or even musical thinking. Concrete lessons will be made and tested by pupils from all four countries. Teachers will learn the possibilities of these programs and methods. In the same time the teachers get familiar with the ICT tools and their usage. Next the focus will be on the robotics and their possibilities to teach our pupils and teachers new ways of learning and teaching. Lastly those two methods will be put together to create coding and gaming activities where the pupil is the active actor himself. Lessons will be written in English and every partner school will translate them if needed in their own languages. We will set up communication lines with our partners (eTwinning, Skype, Hangouts, videoconferences) to discuss, plan, share and enhance information. We will share our experiments at the 3 transnational meetings and 2 learning/teaching events, where the assignments will be discussed, practiced and evaluated. We will include the new competences in our curriculum, set up a program and sequence them in each grade. At the end of the project, we will make a survey to control improvement of the quality in school education and motivation of teachers and pupils. Children, teachers, parents and eTwinning will be the first ambassadors to spread out the results of the project. The lessons will be disseminated in open access webpages for education use for teachers to make future skills available to more pupils.
Our project involved 4 European preprimary and primary schools from Belgium, Spain, Finland, and Turkey. The project aimed to explore, create and reflect on ICT and STEM skills by making pedagogically solid lessons of coding and robotics in order to enhance the creativity of all our pupils by exposing them to new ways of learning. As we started to work with the project we realized that the technology develops so fast that it is more important to create the path how to step on "the technological train". The second year we worked mainly on the pedagogical and curricula requirements of each country and started to find answers to each others needs. Reaching 21st century and STEM skills will lead to increased motivation and self-confidence, the development of an emotional intelligence and consequently a better start for lifelong learning. The starting point to this project lay in the concern of the pupils motivation to learn and the realization that we are facing similar challenges. There is already 15 % school tiredness among the 11 years olds. School failure and absenteeism are the main immediate background for early school leaving, involving in most cases a job failure and exclusion. The primary school contributes to a qualified education , the key competencies and motivation for lifelong learning. The technological Literacy which is required in today's society, requires not only technical elements, but also should enable students abilities to access to future professional interests. That requires pedagogical skills from teachers as well as creativity how the new technologies and pedagogy are combined rationally. Therefore introducing the STEM skills in an early stage will help pupils to discover possibilities of wide range for their future studies. For teachers this future creates opportunities to work out a new, modern and rich way of teaching. In this project teachers role was to coach their students through the different, defiant assignments. Teachers increased their own vocational competencies by learning from their fellow and partner colleagues and used these experiences to encourage the whole school team to work in this new way of thinking and teaching through coding, gaming and robotics. During the two years we created together learning material that was tested and pedagogically valid and in each country a plan how to teach coding, gaming and robotics the way it is rational addition in their own curricula was created. All the involved teachers and pupils learned new ICT and STEM skills and developed their computational thinking skills. Firstly we worked on the coding games: How those will benefit mathematical, lingual or even musical thinking. Concrete lessons were made and tested by pupils from all four countries. Teachers learned the possibilities of these programs and methods. In the same time the teachers got familiar with the ICT tools and their usage. Secondly the focus was on the robotics and their possibilities to teach our pupils and teachers new ways of learning and teaching. Thirdly those two methods were put together to create coding and gaming activities where the pupil is the active actor himself. Lessons were written in English and every partner school translated them if needed in their own languages. Lastly all learned skills we learned together and plans how to teach these new skills at school were made in each country and shared through eTwinning platform and discussed in the project meetings. Three transnational meetings and two learning/teaching events were held, where the assignments were discussed, practiced and evaluated. The final works of each country are published in their open access webpages for education use to make future skills available to more teachers and pupils and the teachers involved in this project will definitely use these future skills in their own work and teach the new skills to their peers.