Collaborative design for smart pupils Erasmus Project

Project Title

Collaborative design for smart pupils

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 : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Gender equality / equal opportunities; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

New forms of work have appeared, prompted by digital development that forces business and workers to be more open, more collaborative. Despite the ever growing need for STEM skills, fewer and fewer youngsters tend to go on with scientific or technical studies. This is a true challenge to fight unemployment in most countries of the European Union. Here, the Leze and the Catalunia territories, while being two distinct environments, both undergo a weaker and weaker economic and social situation combined with a lack of pupils’ interest in scientific and technical subjects. Although youngsters are avid users of digital media, they often prove to lack genuine knowledge in the ability to use ICT. To improve this situation, the Lèze area as well as Catalunya have been involved for a few years in projects of creative and sustainable territories known as “ smart cities”. Today their ambition is to transfer this model to the school system, by inciting the whole educative community ( teachers, educative staff, pupils, parents, educators) to imagine a
smart school for tomorrow.

This 24-month project (September 2015 – September 2017), is an experimental project inviting the entire educational community of colleges (teachers, parents, educational staff, local authorities partners) to imagine innovations, technical, pedagogical, functional, for the college and the city, in order to adapt spaces to uses actually lived or “dreamed”. By transforming the college into a space for innovation and the production of collaborative knowledge, the goal is to put the student’s creativity and imagination at the heart of teaching, the citizen at the heart of digital innovation.

This project is called “Collaborative Design for Smart Pupils”. Nine partners are involved, four in France and five in Spain: they are the community of “communes” of the Arize Lèze valley; André Saint Paul and François Verdier middle school; the centre of scientific and technical culture of the Midi- Pyrénées region, Science Animation; the generalitat de Catalunya with its department of innovation and research, the Virolai and Ernest Lluch middle school; the Everis foundation, which is specialised in the evaluation of public policies and The Social Coin enterprise.

A first step of the project is to share a common culture of work around digital creation. This preliminary step is also an opportunity to validate the collaborative educational approach at work in the project and to program the first educational sequences of the digital innovation and creation workshops. The objective of these workshops, organized in an iterative and incremental way, is to invite the pupils to ask about their college and their city a new glance by taking into account the various actors and uses. Through the acquisition of skills and theoretical technical knowledge and experimentation, students invent innovation projects adapted to their environment. During two consecutive creative stays in Spain and then in France, students experience times of discovery and sharing on science as well as common creation times on their respective projects. All of this experience is documented and archived on the Social Coin collaborative platform and the project’s website, a real toolbox composed among other things of methodological sheets and videos retracing the process and the results achieved. The creation of this platform encourages and facilitates transnational collaboration around scientific and technical projects aimed at improving the school and the city on the basis of creative challenges, and thus contributes to the emergence of a learning community in Europe. the European scale. Finally, thanks to the realization of an impact study, this project made it possible to measure the place of digital creativity in the school motivation of young people in favor of scientific and technical education.

In the end, the project made it possible to experiment with a renewed teaching of STEM, basing it on digital technology and creativity. A multi-disciplinary and transnational approach that reduces inequalities in access to knowledge by improving the acquisition of the cognitive skills necessary to evolve in the complex conceptual world of the digital society. The results were disseminated several times during events dedicated to collaborative and digital pedagogical practices, “It World Edu” and “Social Internet Day” in Barcelona, and “Fab Lab ephemeral” in Ax-les-Thermes .

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 289111 Eur

Project Coordinator

Communauté des communes Arize Lèze & Country: FR

Project Partners

• SCIENCE ANIMATION MIDI-PYRENEES
• EVERIS SPAIN SL
• Virolai E.M.S.A.
• Collège André St Paul
• DEPARTAMENT D’EMPRESA I CONEIXEMENT
• COLLEGE FRANCOIS VERDIER
• INS Ernest Lluch