Sustaining! – Everyone counts Erasmus Project

Project Title

Sustaining! – Everyone counts

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Environment and climate change; Energy and resources

Project Summary

A major problem in the world is overconsumption and energy waste, and at our schools we can clearly see that many of the students are living and consuming in a way that is not sustainable. We also know that the awareness of the impact of every individual on the environment is weak. These severe problems are what we will address with our project.

The overall goal with our project is to make young people aware of their impact on the environment, and what everyone can do to decrease his or her ecological footprints and negative impact on the environment. We will accomplish this by connecting an IT-development task to a task that will rise the environmental awareness of the students and make them live in a more sustainable and environmentally friendly way.

The first step of the project is to define what deeds are considered as sustainable (‘fames’) as well non-sustainable (‘shames’) actions and conditions. Then the students will take pictures of ’fames’ and ‘shames’ that they will upload to a database. The application developed by the students will then count and sort the pictures (or fames and shames) and create a (public) digital “wall of fame” where good and bad examples of sustainable living will be displayed to be studied and learnt from.

The participants of the project will be IT-students at upper secondary schools in Växjö, Sweden, and Löhne, Germany. The participants are 16 to 19 years old, and approximately 180 students will be involved during the project time. Four meetings will be held, where background research will be done and the application will be programmed. To these meetings the sending schools will attend with 12 or 14 students.

In order to keep the project going in a well-structured way we will use the Scrum and Kanbas methods. A great advantage with this is that the students will work with methods that are similar to what they will meet in their future jobs. And since there will be a lot of work done over the Internet between the meetings, the similarity to a real-life IT development project will be even stronger, thus preparing the students for their future jobs.

A key feature of the project is peer to peer teaching, where older, more experienced, students will teach the younger beginners in programming, which will strengthen the students’ pedagogical skills. Also, the transnational development work will also give the students a wider cultural understanding, good language training and general preparations to live and work in a multicultural global and digital world.

At the first meeting, the students will get the task (to develop the application) and the framework for it (i.e. issues on sustainable living, factfulness and the Scrum and Kanban methods) and they will also decide on the basic content and design of the application to be developed. The work will then continue via Internet until the second meeting, which will focus on programming and testing, as well as further discussions on the issue of sustainable living. Between the second and third meeting, the work will continue via Internet until the third meeting, when the application is supposed to be almost finished to a level where only additional tests are left.

The fourth and last project meeting is dedicated to dissemination. The application will be deployed and made public, and the students in the project will meet other students to talk about the project, sustainable living and how the everyday choices of each individual can have an impact on the environment.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 65616 Eur

Project Coordinator

Teknikum & Country: SE

Project Partners

• August-Griese-Berufskolleg