Educational Advacement of ICT-based spatial Literacy in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Educational Advacement of ICT-based spatial Literacy in 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 : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) and spatial literacy are essential in many professional and everyday activities. Spatial literacy, learning about and improving interaction with one’s surroundings, is an inherently trans-disciplinary competency transcending from STEM to social sciences and arts. Despite the omnipresence of geospatial and ICT technologies, they are insufficiently integrated into current teaching practices in secondary schools. The key reason for this discrepancy is the lack of “out-of-the-box” solutions for teachers, which provide an engaging experience to pupils.
The strategic partnership aimed at overcoming this shortcoming by developing suitable tools and teaching material. The project aimed at integrating ICT and spatial literacy to secondary school education by
(i) developing an out-of-the-box toolbox to educate children with better ICT and spatial skills to prepare them for the labour market,
(ii) enabling secondary school teachers to teach ICT-based spatial literacy,
(iii) disseminating these results to pupils, teachers, educationalists and teachers students in Germany, Spain, Portugal, and across Europe.
The three universities – University of Muenster, University of Aveiro, and University of Jaume – formed the core of the strategic partnership. To ensure the involvement of teachers and pupils in the development process, three secondary schools and four centres for teacher education joined the team. They acted as stakeholders, tested the software and pedagogical material during the development process and gave valuable feedback. Our associated industry partner Esri acted as technology provider.

Main Results and Output:
In this project, we developed a toolbox consisting of the mobile app “OriGami” and the app “NavApps”. Both apps run on smartphones and make extensive use of geospatial technologies. Through gamification and collaboration we engage pupils and motivate them to play our educative games not only in class, but also with friends in their leisure time. The mobile apps are open-source and publically available.
OriGami is an outdoor game fostering spatial literacy through navigation tasks and thematic tasks. Teachers designing a game for their pupils could choose from different navigation tasks: A route-following task and a destination approximation task. Both navigation tasks trained pupils in map-reading and navigation skills. The thematic tasks could be adapted to the subject taught by the teacher. In our user tests, biology teachers lead their pupils navigate to particular trees on the school ground. Having reached the tree, pupils had to answer questions or solve tasks related to the tree species. OriGami allowed for interactive tasks where pupils experience the real-world phenomena in various different ways. The length and the complexity of the game could be adapted to the needs of the teacher and the pupils learning stage.
NavApps is an indoor treasure hunting game. Spatial competencies were trained in all phases of the game: In the first and second phase of the game, pupils had to map the building and hide treasures within the building. This way they got to know basic knowledge about digital map representations and georeferencing of objects such as treasures. Map reading and map representations as well as the usage of digital mobile devices to data collection was the focus of this part of the game. In the third and last phase of the treasure hunting game, pupils had to search and find the hidden treasures. This part trained pupils in their wayfinding and navigation skills as well as the skill to orient themselves with maps.
The University of Aveiro developed the teaching materials and tested both games in various different formats: teacher trainings as well as long-term and short-term trainings for pupils together with their teachers. These trainings gave us important information regarding the challenge that teachers’ lack of IT experience is often the bottleneck to use ICT in classrooms. We involved teachers from our associated schools to take their perspective into account and develop ICT-based concepts and teaching materials. Towards the end of the project, all three partners conducted teacher trainings in all countries. The results of the project were presented to the public in three launch events, in which we were able to attract a large number of people and potential stakeholders. Furthermore, we used conferences and workshops as events to communicate our results to the scientific community. Numerous scientific publications resulted from the project and attracted attention in our research groups developing games for spatial literacy education,
We believe that, with this project, we reached our major goal of creating a toolbox with which
(i) children can be trained in ICT-based spatial literacy automatically through playing our games and
(ii) teachers are supported to use IT tools in class to educate pupils with better spatial and ICT competencies.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 212939 Eur

Project Coordinator

WESTFAELISCHE WILHELMS-UNIVERSITAET MUENSTER & Country: DE

Project Partners

• UNIVERSIDADE DE AVEIRO
• UNIVERSITAT JAUME I DE CASTELLON