With this project, we will guide our pupils in exploring known and unknown locations of our territory, so that they may develop a major awareness of their surroundings. It often happens that we admire places in foreign countries without considering that we also are surrounded by important historical or artistic locations . We want to interest our pupils in these realities so that they can get to know them better and thus talk about them to our partners. It often happens that in a town there is a location, a monument, etc., that deserves to be known but, instead, is ignored by their own inhabitants; places or monuments of historical or cultural importance that deserve to be adopted and made known. Our pupils will become little explorers and will search for such locations, monuments or objects which seem to have no fame, but which should be reconsidered for their important past. With the help of the people that live nearby, our pupils will reconstruct the history of these exchequers, in every detail concerning them (stories, pictures,….), and then, like little geographers, they will trace ancient and current trails or paths and, thanks to the new computational technique of "coding", they will produce paper and viirtual maps to share. This will be the most the most interesting part of our project, for the educational and mind growth of our pupils . In fact, as David Jonassen writes, "Learning doesn’t come from technology or from a teacher. You leaarn by thought; mindtools mediate learning.” We live in times in which our children grow up handling, since the day they’re born, preconstructed objects, stereotyped toys that grant them no space for developing their own creativity. In the past, when toys were made of whatever Nature offered or of whatever a child would find around him, he had more fun and his fun lasted longer because, with his own creativity and fantasy, he would give new life to any ordinary and insignificant object…and his satisfaction, in seeing this object being transformed according to his desire, was big. That’s why we woud like to introduce in our schools, the benefits of “computational thinking”. With teaching “coding” to our children, they shall be able to cope, now and in the future, with complex problems , they will learn how to approach them by reason, by assuming step by step solutions that they believe to be the best , they will conceive a clear description of what to do and when to do it. They will learn to reach a target, having fun and, above all, they won’t benefit of a new acquisition in a passive way, but will obtain it “using their own mind” (coding). The objectives we intend to achieve are the following: - To develop awareness of our own territory: its History, artistic resources, and its touristic potentialities; - To discover and retreive forgotten art pieces of one's territory; - To give children the possibility to "narrate" their own territory to others, using a common language; - To use ICT tools and Internet to learn in a critical and conscious way; - To learn computational thinking to develop logical competences and the capacity to resolve problems in a creative and efficient way (coding); - To be able to produce an end product; - To know and use software and step by step programming spaces: Swatch, Blocky, Padlet platform.
Our project, “We little XXI century explorers, ready to map and code out territory”, in partnership with Croatia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy as coordinator, has had as main target children ranging from 3 to 14 years of age. The project has focused on two main fields, seemingly unconnected one to the other, but becoming, afterwards, complementary: -the exploring of known and unknown locations and monuments of our territory, ( to develop in our children a major awareness of their surroundings); -and the study of the new computational technique of "coding”. Thus, our pupils have become “little explorers”, searching locations, monuments or objects, reconsidered by them for their important past, and learning, by research work and interviews to elder people living in the territory, all the historical and artistic value concerning them. This part of our project work has aroused, in a significant way, the awareness of our local surroundings. Then, like little geographers, they have traced ancient and current trails or paths leading to them and, using "coding", they have produced paper and virtual coded maps to share. They have also represented these coded paths and the storytelling of their local sites and monuments, producing many Scratch projects, bettering logical and ICT skills. All this work has been brought forward by the children, using our community language, which is English, thus developing foreign language skills in a meaningful way. The results we’ve obtained in all our partner schools have been amazing; what we initially thought to be ambitious (coding), has aroused interest and involvement in all our project participants (children and adults), and also in people outside the project, like teachers in other schools in our territory. With teaching “coding” to our children, they have learnt to face and cope with problem situations, understanding that they need to be faced gradually and in order of logical succession; algorithms have been very useful in conveying this type of computational thinking; our children have learnt to approach problem situations by reason, by assuming step by step solutions and acquiring knowledge “using their own mind” (coding).