CURIO - A Teaching Toolkit for Fostering Scientific Curiosity

Project summary

CURIO is a three-year Strategic Partnership in the field of education, aiming to establish an innovative framework that has, at its core, a flexible, co-designed, virtual exploration environment. The goal of CURIO is to empower teachers with an interactive, playful virtual worls that encourages learning through discovery and allows for the creation of new experiences and scenarios. Through digital interations with its virtual world, CURIO will stimulate creative problem-solving and a more positive attitude towards scientific inquiry and scientific discovery by appealing to the innate sense of curiosity that characterizes human beings. In contemporary society, and given its growing complexity and interrelations, we consider it crucial to equip upcoming generations with the skills needed for independent and adaptive problem solving. Whereas manual labour is progressively automatized, the workforce of the future will demand people equipped not only with practical know-how, but also with the ability to conquer the ‘as of yet unknown’. As such, the project seeks to integrate traditional teaching curricula with digital learning experiences that, in addition to transferring usable notions, will also provide a supervised, cognitive training ground for acquiring and structuring notions themselves. By giving teachers the ability to let students playfully explore and experiment with interactive, educational content in a controlled way, learning material can be contextualized beyond what would be feasible in classrooms alone. Unlike most software designed for the classroom, playful or not, CURIO will be developed through direct collaboration with teachers, and will provide them the ability to actively control and modify the digital learning experience in real-time. In doing so, it grants teachers a unique level of control, authorship, and active participation in the digital learning experience. In addition to developing a range of scenarios based on existing curricular activities, CURIO will include an authoring tool for the development of new exploration scenarios for use in the virtual environment. This ensures that teachers, as well as students, will be able to expand on the content that is initially provided. The framework is built upon two core concepts: the measured success of ‘serious games’ to influence attitudes and performance, and the collaboration between teachers and students as both authors and participants in a shared learning environment. The project brings together educators, academics, and game developers from three different countries - Malta, Italy, and Sweden - to develop a virtual exploration environment for use in the classroom. The project will conduct an analysis of, and produce a comprehensive framework based on the use of digital learning materials in the four countries involved. The framework will inform the design and development of the game-based virtual environment and its integrated creation kit. Its design and development will involve educators of the different countries in every step of the development to ensure its usability and functionality. Manuals and documentation for educators will be produced to assist with integrating CURIO into primary school curricula. Additionally, seminars in the respective countries will be held to introduce teachers to the creation kit, empowering them to become authors and to create and modify their own custom educational scenarios. Finally, through regular sessions held with students in all participating countries stretching one year after the launch and implementation of CURIO, the project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the virtual environment and its creation tools. The potential of CURIO will resonate through active collaboration with selected schools, whose teachers will also contribute to the training of other teachers and in the dissemination of the possibilities and outcomes of integrating digital interactive experiences in pedagogical practices. In conclusion, CURIO is an innovative project that discloses flexible and interactive scenarios that would be costly, dangerous, or downright impossible to experience in the real world, let alone in a class environment. It aims at framing new ways of thinking, of self-constructing, problem-solving, gathering and framing knowledge. It will encourage an exploratory mindset that will contribute to the development of highly skilled academics, scientists, and engineers in Europe through the stimulation of unconventional thinking and an active interest in the unknown. CURIO will pursue this objective by supporting teachers, and providing them with a simple-to-use creation kit that will empower them to create and share interactive, virtual learning scenarios. In other words, we aim at disclosing the benefits of a digital medium without taking control over the subject matter away from the educator, but rather to empower them to diversify and innovate their pedagogical activities.