CODING in a cultural Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

CODING in a cultural Europe

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation

Project Summary

The project Coding in a Cultural Europe” has created a network of schools across Europe to develop the “21st Century Skills”; such as creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, digital competence, teamwork and collaboration in virtual teams, multiple languages and cultural awareness.
Our main ain in project has developed and shared good practices and innovative educational ways to use coding and new technologies at school, for students from 3 to 13 years old, in order to create a computational thinking vertical curriculum .
Spain, Lithuania, U. Kingdom, Turkey, Croatia and Poland have been partners in this project: When we started all of us brought different backgrounds and brought their experience and skills in using coding and computer programming in the daily activities.
The goal of the project was to learn from each other and experience together new activities and methodologies, to develop critical and computational thinking.
Our students shared off inline and online coding activities, they used programming platform like Scratch Junior and Scratch to develop games and digital storytelling, they had a first approach to robotics education.
We were working online in a virtual classroom, using Google, Microsoft as educational platforms to learn together and create groups.
We also used our web pages and social networks to disseminate our results and to involve an increasing number of digital users, not only students and teachers, but also our stakeholders like families, local community and authorities.
Our aspiration was to help children to turn from digital consumers to digital producers, paying special attention to the new opportunities that coding and ICT offered for the inclusion of students with special needs or social difficulties.
Our aim was also to build a Teachers’ “Code European community”, where we could:
-Share good coding and computer science practices that we could use in our classroom at the moment.
– Inform other teachers, public, families about our project.
– Collaborate with different nation researchers, technology developers, state and local leaders to disseminate the idea that technology is advanced in ways that promote young children’s healthy development and learning.
For this reason we also focussed on teachers training, they had several occasions to get trained about our topics, in online and face-to-face meetings.
The project activities were based in planning, monitoring and implementing the tasks, videoconferences and training activities using the ICT tools, storytelling, pixelart, video, apps, games and ebook editing. Each partner school celebrated open days and special events that helped with the dissemination of the project, marking international/European recurrent occasions, such as Code week, Project activities were also focused on assessment and training teachers in courses.
Short term exchange of pupils activities were focused on learning scratch, ICT activities, creation of stories using Scratch and introduction to robotics.
The outcome of the project enhanced expertise of teachers of all ages, it increased students’ motivation and competence in using coding and ICT tools, improved awareness of the multiple uses and benefits of coding for policy makers and local communities and a large range of material and digital products to be shared with all project stakeholders by means of social media and events on site, so that to offer tips for new ideas and applications.
We had difficulties produced by the state of Pandemic. We were ready to travel the 20th March and Alarm state was declared the 14th. We were shocked because the situation and in the next month’s our main activity was based in contacting with partners worried by the situation. At the beginning of the new course was when we planned virtual activities in order to continue with our project. Our students made on line presentations, scratch activities on line and cultural activities through some apps. All the time we had the idea of traveling to continue with the big opportunities that mobility gave. Mobility in England was cancelled finally and in the month of July Spanish mobility could be done by some partners, so we planned virtual mobility and real mobility paralleled.
We also promoted respect to our cultures. This is why we aimed to contribute to create a more respectful continent, celebrating the Heritage Culture of each country during the visits, in order to contribute to prevent negative actions among countries and fostering values of respect, friendly relationship and proud of our continent.

Project Website

https://codingeu.edublogs.org/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131927,37 Eur

Project Coordinator

Colegio Publico Ocejon & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Highnam CE Primary Academy
• Szkola Podstawowa nr 2 im. Henryka Sienkiewicza w Ziebicach
• Suadiye Ortaokulu
• Prienu ,,Revuonos” pagrindine mokykla
• Osnovna skola Julija Kempfa Pozega