As globalization continues to confront the European Union with new challenges, each citizen will need a wide range of skills to adapt flexibly to a rapidly changing and highly interconnected world. These skills emerge today as key to allow people develop good-quality jobs and fulfill their potential as confident, active citizens. Based on the European Commission’s reports, early acquisition of these skills is the foundation for the development of higher, more complex skills which are needed to drive creativity and innovation. Education in its dual role, both social and economic, has a key role to play in ensuring that Europe’s citizens acquire the skills needed to enable them to adapt. Implementing key competences in schools involves not only specifying them in curricula, but also developing structures, innovative teaching methods as well as proper ICT tools that are open to teachers and students. Given their cross-curricular nature, this involves a whole-school planning. According to the European association KeyConet (Key competence Network in School Education), the key themes in teaching Key Competences for the 21st century relate to creating meaningful education based on real problems and engagement, interdisciplinary environments that enhance learners' experiences through goal-directed, active, authentic and collaborative tasks. Mobile Augmented Reality Games (MARG) are gaming environments that embed virtual, location-specific and contextual information into a physical site. These games require mobile or ubiquitous computing devices, such as hand-held computers or cellular phones, to enable game participants to access this virtual information. Instead of putting people in an artificial world, these games augment the physical world by embedding them with digital data, networking and communication abilities, and enhanced properties providing at the same time in-situ or inquiry-based learning experiences. Research on the use of MARG has shown potential benefits in fostering key competences such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, social and civic competences as well as cultural awareness. However, there is a lack of an organized effort to sum up the potential benefits of these games and more importantly to incorporate them in the teaching practice as teachers’ toolkit to foster students' key competences. The MARG is a KA2 Erasmus+ project in the field of Strategic Partnerships for School Education promoting innovation. It will involve the cooperation of 8 partners (4 Higher Education/Researcher Institutes and 4 schools) from three different EU countries (Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Netherlands). The project's objectives are to: •Explore examples of MARG for learning in the aspects of developing students’ key competences •Contribute to developing and implementing innovative technologies in formal or informal settings by developing user guidelines of MARG tools • Develop a learning design framework for teaching the following key competences through MARG: a) civic competences such as critical thinking, active citizenship, respect for differences b) digital competences such as information and data literacy, communication and collaboration and problem solving • Make use of the existing AR games platforms and provide educators with the necessary technical knowledge to create their own content for fostering students’ key competences through learning about sustainable development • Provide educators with the tools and methodology to implement, evaluate and assess key competences of their students as well as act as educators-researchers through action research based education MARG is s methodologically structured to fully support the production of the following 5 intellectual outputs: -IO1: An Augmented reality Teaching Toolkit including research on the available technologies and digital tools, users’ instructions, comparison of the available digital tools for the creation of Mobile Augmented Reality Games. -IO2: A learning design framework for MARG and educational scenarios: including research on the available instructional designs, delimitation of design guidelines, transformation of the design criteria towards the target competences and skills; 20 MARG designed by the participating teachers towards the development of digital and civic competences of students in the context of sustainable development. These scenarios will be available in an open-access repository for use by other educators across Europe. -IO3: 20 Mobile Augmented Reality Games, developed by the participating teachers, available in free-to-use AR platforms, that can be played by students and help them develop their digital and civic competences as well their transversal skills. -IO4: Implementation and a research report on the MARG intervention in the teaching practice that will evaluate the added value of these games in teaching key competencies. -IO5: A MARG21 MOOC which will provide European educators with training.
The UMARG project objectives were to: (1) Explore examples of MARG for learning in the aspects of developing students’ key competences; (2) Contribute to developing and implementing innovative technologies in formal or informal settings by developing user guidelines of MARG tools; (3) Develop a learning design framework for teaching the following key competences through MARG: (a) civic competences such as critical thinking, active citizenship, respect for differences; (b) digital competences such as information and data literacy, communication and collaboration and problem solving; (4) Make use of the existing AR games platforms and provide educators with the necessary technical knowledge to create their own content for fostering students’ key competences through learning about sustainable development; (5) Provide educators with the tools and methodology to implement, evaluate and assess key competences of their students as well as to act as educator-researchers through action research-based education.
Key competences have grown in prominence in European education systems in the past decade but as globalization continues to confront the EU with new challenges, each citizen will need a wide range of skills to adapt to rapidly changing & highly interconnected world. These skills allow people develop good-quality jobs and fulfil their potential as active citizens. Policies to improve the development and availability of digital learning resources exist in almost all European education systems. The use of Mobile Augmented Reality Games (MARG) is considered as an innovative approach in teaching key competences and is expected to play a dominant role in the way we learn in the next years. However, MARG is still in an advancing state and most educators are mainly not aware of it and in most cases not properly trained to implement it in teaching. There is need to support teachers with new tools and procedures to cultivate the development of certain 21st Century Skills and key competences in their students. MARG are among such tools. Providing educators with the necessary knowledge and skills in order to make them able to create and use MARGs to help students develop key competencies and skills was the main need our project has addressed.
As globalization continues to confront the European Union with new challenges, each citizen will need a wide range of skills to adapt flexibly to a rapidly changing and highly interconnected world. These skills emerge today as key to allow people develop good-quality jobs and fulfill their potential as confident, active citizens. Based on the European Commission’s reports, early acquisition of these skills is the foundation for the development of higher, more complex skills which are needed to drive creativity and innovation. Education in its dual role, both social and economic, has a key role to play in ensuring that Europe’s citizens acquire the skills needed to enable them to adapt. Implementing key competences in schools involves not only specifying them in curricula, but also developing structures, innovative teaching methods as well as proper ICT tools that are open to teachers and students. Given their cross-curricular nature, this involves a whole-school planning. According to the European association KeyConet (Key competence Network in School Education), the key themes in teaching Key Competences for the 21st century relate to creating meaningful education based on real problems and engagement, interdisciplinary environments that enhance learners' experiences through goal-directed, active, authentic and collaborative tasks. Mobile Augmented Reality Games (MARG) are gaming environments that embed virtual, location-specific and contextual information into a physical site. These games require mobile or ubiquitous computing devices, such as hand-held computers or cellular phones, to enable game participants to access this virtual information. Instead of putting people in an artificial world, these games augment the physical world by embedding them with digital data, networking and communication abilities, and enhanced properties providing at the same time in-situ or inquiry-based learning experiences. Research on the use of MARG has shown potential benefits in fostering key competences such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, social and civic competences as well as cultural awareness. However, there is a lack of an organized effort to sum up the potential benefits of these games and more importantly to incorporate them in the teaching practice as teachers’ toolkit to foster students' key competences. The MARG is a KA2 Erasmus+ project in the field of Strategic Partnerships for School Education promoting innovation. It will involve the cooperation of 8 partners (4 Higher Education/Researcher Institutes and 4 schools) from three different EU countries (Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Netherlands). The project's objectives are to: •Explore examples of MARG for learning in the aspects of developing students’ key competences •Contribute to developing and implementing innovative technologies in formal or informal settings by developing user guidelines of MARG tools • Develop a learning design framework for teaching the following key competences through MARG: a) civic competences such as critical thinking, active citizenship, respect for differences b) digital competences such as information and data literacy, communication and collaboration and problem solving • Make use of the existing AR games platforms and provide educators with the necessary technical knowledge to create their own content for fostering students’ key competences through learning about sustainable development • Provide educators with the tools and methodology to implement, evaluate and assess key competences of their students as well as act as educators-researchers through action research based education MARG is s methodologically structured to fully support the production of the following 5 intellectual outputs: -IO1: An Augmented reality Teaching Toolkit including research on the available technologies and digital tools, users’ instructions, comparison of the available digital tools for the creation of Mobile Augmented Reality Games. -IO2: A learning design framework for MARG and educational scenarios: including research on the available instructional designs, delimitation of design guidelines, transformation of the design criteria towards the target competences and skills; 20 MARG designed by the participating teachers towards the development of digital and civic competences of students in the context of sustainable development. These scenarios will be available in an open-access repository for use by other educators across Europe. -IO3: 20 Mobile Augmented Reality Games, developed by the participating teachers, available in free-to-use AR platforms, that can be played by students and help them develop their digital and civic competences as well their transversal skills. -IO4: Implementation and a research report on the MARG intervention in the teaching practice that will evaluate the added value of these games in teaching key competencies. -IO5: A MARG21 MOOC which will provide European educators with training.