CURIO – A Teaching Toolkit for Fostering Scientific Curiosity Erasmus Project

Project Title

CURIO – A Teaching Toolkit for Fostering Scientific Curiosity

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

CURIO – A Teaching Toolkit for Fostering Scientific Curiosity is a Strategic Partnership in the Field of Education aiming to produce an innovative solution to foster curious attitude towards scientific themes and ideas with a specific focus towards primary school students (ages 8-11). The goal of CURIO is to empower teachers with interactive, playful virtual worlds that encourage learning through discovery and allows for the creation of new experiences and scenarios. Through digital interactions with its virtual world, CURIO will stimulate creative problem-solving and a more positive attitude towards scientific inquiry and scientific discovery by appealing to the innate sense of curiosity that characterizes human beings. In contemporary society, and given its growing complexity and interrelations, we consider it crucial to equip upcoming generations with the skills needed for independent and adaptive problem solving. Whereas manual labour is progressively automatized, the workforce of the future will demand people equipped not only with practical know-how, but also with the ability to conquer the ‘as of yet unknown’. As such, the project seeks to integrate traditional teaching curricula with digital learning experiences that, in addition to transferring usable notions, will also provide a supervised, cognitive training ground for acquiring and structuring notions themselves. The toolkit that we designed is supposed to be a quick and accessible tool for teachers for in-class use.
CURIO’s aspirations are those of fostering scientific curiosity and encouraging the students to have a more positive disposition towards scientific research both generally, as a component of social discourse, and as a potential future occupation. Towards those objectives, the project builds on existing successful European projects and initiatives to produce a comprehensive pedagogical approach and methodology informing the development of teacher training curriculum and corresponding training courses, teaching methods and materials for activities with pupils, as well as corresponding ICT support tools enabling a game-based learning approach. Integral parts of the project are implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the proposed innovation, including teacher training events and the careful production of freely available and accessible didactic material online. To these goals, the project brings together five partners (four official ones and an informal one) representing the worlds of game-based learning and learning technologies as well as the world of education including schools, pedagogy experts and teacher training institutions. Our partners hail from three European countries, Malta, Sweden and The Netherlands, which were selected among leaders and key players in today’s landscape in education innovation and serious game development.
The project builds on existing experience in designing and developing award-winning game-based European projects. On that basis, and with the support of experienced partners in the fields of science, education, creativity, lateral thinking, and pedagogy, CURIO is expected to have a manifold social impact. It will contribute to the field of school education, implement game-based learning practices to address pressing pedagogical and societal issues, and disclose several opportunities to advance academic research in the fields of pedagogy and game studies. Taking into consideration the various aspects of society in which CURIO proposes its timely intervention for innovative education, and the many channels through which its application and dissemination is envisaged to take place, we believe we can claim that our proposition guarantees a compelling social impact.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 116300 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITA TA MALTA & Country: MT

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITA CA’ FOSCARI VENEZIA
• Placeholder Interactive Limited
• HOGSKOLAN I SKOVDE