The overall context for this project is the status of construction in education. Historically is has been seen as secondary to the literacy/numeracy based academic domain. In the current situation, where resources are unsustainably being depleted, pollution as a by-product of constructive activities has been less regarded and largely subsumed under the vocational heading; or, in the case of the kindergarten, the target of this project, viewed as creative play. However, construction embodies all the competencies and cognitive content of the STEM agenda. Our constructive capacity has affected the historic core of education, language and mathematics, more than any other. From the four function calculator to laser measuring; from speech recognition to language translation; through keyboards, word processing with its uniform text and spelling and grammar checking; and the internet with its social media and questionable information has brought in to question the relative status of construction. Our children are fully aware that much of what they are taught has been automated (by the algorithmic machine described by Alan Turing in 1936). Rebalancing education requires an organic process that targets the earliest education phase: kindergarten. The aim of the project is to develop a project based on commercially available construction materials that are also available homes and through the used material market. This project, within the constraints that material imposes, seeks to begin the process of rebalancing by developing a curriculum and teaching method that uses these “play” materials systematically to develop construction and in a manner appropriate for kindergarten children. This will include the principles of sound construction, aesthetics, and cognitive aspects. Teaching method will be based on the cooperative construction of situations that can lead to discussion by the whole class. Organisation will be provided by the applicant. Three expert teachers with a constructional background and experience with the age group, in teacher training, and contributions to professional education publications will devise the teaching objectives, method, and, in conjunction with the kindergarten partners, the lesson plans. These three will provide mentoring throughout the project and evaluate the outcomes. The kindergartens will be three in number, spread across the EU both geographically and linguistically. The lessons will be devised for a whole kindergarten class. These will entail the construction of situations that represent relevant aspects of the world the children know, either from personal experience or through media. In addition to the construction materials that form the foundation of the project, material commonly found in kindergartens will be incorporated. Evaluation will be formative and based on criteria: completion of a soundly constructed and aesthetically pleasing representational situation. Children will work in cooperative groups, an aspect that will be monitored for success in the outcome. Given that children of this age are beginning to develop graphic capabilities, their drawings of the completed situations will be used as an indicator of cognitive and perceptional development. The overall outcome will be a set of lesson plans and teacher guides that may successfully be used in kindergarten to give construction a higher status and cognitive content. The lessons, emphasising STEM links and content, will also contribute to the wider objectives of kindergarten, the social dimension in particular through cooperative working. Coupled with the steady advance of technology into the earliest phase of education, construction using this concept and associated method and material may contribute to the inexorable change in education that the shift from paper to what has been called the Turing medium entails.
Through the realization of the project, we aimed to achieve the development, approbation, and sustainable use of methodology for working with constructive activities in kindergarten as an educational tool in the comprehension and enhancing of educational content. The realization of this goal included the development of three main intellectual products: - methodology for working with constructive material in kindergarten, which had to contain a description of the training units for the teacher and accompanying teaching materials for children. - educational portal with all created and additional materials necessary to ensure the use of the methodology; - a training course for teachers that can be offered both under the Erasmus+ programme, Key Action 1 and locally in each of the three countries participating in the project. In parallel, participants in the project activities had to increase their knowledge and skills for the use of constructive activities in different education systems, about the variety of constructive sets that can be used when working with children, about the educational content that is studied in the kindergartens of partner countries.
Constructive activities are some of the most favorite activities for children. In kindergartens, they are mainly used for individual, or group free play time. However, constructive activities have great educational potential and can be a useful tool in the hands of the teacher. They can support the systematic use of the STEAM approach in training and enable the development of the seven key competences. The aim of the project is to develop a methodology for the use of constructive activities in the comprehension of educational content in kindergarten, which will be applicable in different countries when working with different numbers of children. The methodology developed must use constructive elements that are accessible and well known in different countries, provide a set of constructive activities that correspond to the learning content that is studied in the kindergarten of different countries, enable the teacher to use the developed content in his own way, taking into account the indigenous characteristics of the children and the group with which he works.