Breaking The Code : a Pathway to Success Erasmus Project

Project Title

Breaking The Code : a Pathway to Success

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 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Research and innovation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

Context /Background
All the partners of this project were schools of the European mediterranean area which share a set of common problems in the everyday teaching activities: their students often fail to grasp the meaningful information for lack of interest and poor attention ( such as poor results in scientific subjects, inability to use maps or notes in a meaningful way.) The number of low achievers in scientific subjects was not underestimated (especially girls) and required tailored strategies to face this problem
Objective
As the mission of all the partners was to improve the quality of their teaching, we all wanted to take advantage of this project to implement a sort of a bottom up approach to improve the quality of our teaching offer. The general approach has been holistic and mainly inspired to edutainment philosophy, problem solving ,thought provoking task based learning, team work and cooperative learning, learning by discovery and many others
The main aim were :
to improve the performances and the willingness to take risk of low achievers, lowering their resistance thanks to combination of enjoyable and engaging activities
to improve the performances of average high achievers thanks to their commitment creativeness ability to think out of scheme, their curiosity , enthusiasm , capacity to face challenges, doing their best not only as individual but supporting team work and their role within a group.
to raise the level of competence in English as EFL
to get the outmost of ICT and digital technologies
to promote sport in education
to boost active European citizenship , cultural tolerance and awareness 

to allow partner schools to gain more visibility for quality matters

Number of participants
The initial mobilities planned involved a total of 225 people (students and teachers and principals) asa matter of fact the number of people who got the grant to join a mobility was higher.
The number of people involved in the project activities at schools level was much wider ( over 2500 people all together) If we consider the disseminating actions and cooperation with other agents we overcame 3000 people.

Profile
The students age range went from 14 to 19 and most of them were prospective university students. Some partner had previous experience in European projects some were new. But they all shared high professional profile of the teachers involved ( good and and sound proficiency of English , expertise of ICT tools , use of social media good digital and communication skills) .
The subjects covered by the project activities were : Maths , Physics, Chemistry , ICT, PE, Geography, History , Arts, English , Spanish and French. There were some collaborations with University departments in Turin , Chania teachers associations ( Italian MIUR, British Council, AIIG (association of geography teachers,) Maths associations, the Cern in Geneve) .

Description of activities
The range and the number of the activities planned was very high. Some partners opted for a thematic cluster of activities such as exploring cultural place (e.g. the Spanish partner with ‘the Reales Alcazares’, the Cypriot partner with the Mosaics which will become one of the event of Pafos 2017.Some activities focused on the creative use of software ( Geogebra and some apps made for Maths low achievers) Maths was a common theme for Maths Dance whose videos on Youtube reached more than 10000 views and Maths Marathon inspired to Alan Turing work. Other teachers have focused more on the methodologies and approaches (such as the Scratch and Robotics activities in Greece, the Cryptography activity with credit cards and Maths) All of them used widely ICT and digital technologies (most of all The Eu Factor , Hand Gesture, Bloopers and Who wants to be Millionaire) The list and the variety is really very rich and worth to be experimented.

Description of expected results
One of the project aim was to share the ‘good practices’ among teachers, that’s why we made our best to share the ‘good ones’
The activities planned have been implemented in schools curricula and are all free available on the website of the projects and other educational platforms.

Potential long term benefits
We believe that spreading the words about the all the philosophy of the project , its outcomes, its success, strength and also the analysis of critical points and stages , the assessment results and teaching, has already raised the quality profile of the schools and will create opportunities to extend the project and develop new partnerships. Maybe with a wider range of partners .
This will provide a good reason for all the partners involved to invest time and effort in dissemination and follow up.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 252455 Eur

Project Coordinator

Liceo Giordano Bruno & Country: IT

Project Partners

• THEODOROPOULOS SCHOOLS
• MEV Koleji Ozel Guzelbahce Fen Lisesi
• LYKEIO AGIOU NEOFYTOU
• IES Maestro Diego Llorente