Learning STEAM through a playful online platform, social learning and content co-creation Erasmus Project

Project Title

Learning STEAM through a playful online platform, social learning and content co-creation

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 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Although important figures in Pedagogy (i.e., Dewey, Montessori, Illich, etc.) proposed new ways of understanding education more than one century ago, the majority of EU educational systems are based on methodologies strongly focused on curriculum contents. In recent years, taking advantage of the popularization of educational technology in schools, many teachers are opting for other ways to teach and learn. The educational debate revolves around two ends: 1) those who emphasize the importance of declarative content as scaffolding to solidly support new learning (“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”) and 2) those who stress the role of procedural learning (“learning by doing”) preparing students to face new and unknown scenarios. The main objective of STEAM Decks is to build a bridge between these two opposing visions and get the best of both. On the one hand, a good base of declarative knowledge is essential to avoid having to re-discover so many things that Humanity has already discovered, as long as this declarative knowledge is learned in a contextualized and meaningful way. On the other hand, ICT can go beyond static learning contents and take advantage from video game dynamics (gamification) to encourage the acquisition of knowledge and skills development actively.

To achieve this goal, STEAM Decks provides a free access online platform (https://steamdecks.deusto.es) and App for Android (available at Google Play) where primary and secondary school students are able to develop declarative knowledge in a contextualized and meaningful way through a multiplayer and online card game. The platform allows you to register and configure the user profile (avatar, optional personal data, preferred language), search for decks of cards and mark them as favorites, search for other users and mark them as friends (this facilitates the creation of new games with friends later), play a deck of cards individually, against a friend or against any user available at that time on the platform, print a deck of cards to play offline, remix a deck of cards to create a new modified version of it or create a deck of cards from scratch. All images used in the platform are extracted from Wikipedia to avoid copyright problems and to avoid the use of inappropriate images.

We have developed more than 300 cards of different STEAM topics translated into six languages (English, French, Spanish, Romanian, German and Basque) so that the initial users of the platform can take advantage of it from the beginning and understand what kind of skills can be developed using it.

Teachers and students of primary and secondary schools are the main target groups of the project’s activities. With the development of STEAM Decks they have a flexible, attractive and innovative educational tool to develop STEAM-related competencies. Students have resources ready to be used and learn with them, but the platform enables them to modify, adapt, remix and even create new learning materials from scratch. Rather than being mere recipients of learning contents developed by publishers, they can be creators of open educational resources, encouraging an active participation in their learning and promoting their creativity. Students, with available learning resources, become protagonists of their learning, and will manage the resources at their disposal.

The project consortium is integrated by five partners from four countries (Spain, German, France and Romania). One university three schools of primary and secondary education and an association of women in technolgy. Having a transnational consortium is important to create a rich variety of ready-to-use card decks. Moreover, multilingual card decks can be used to develop multiculturalism and language skills at the same time.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 119288 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSIDAD DE LA IGLESIA DE DEUSTO ENTIDAD RELIGIOSA & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Fundación Educativa ACI Esclavas SC-Fatima
• DUCHESS FRANCE
• Bertha-von-Suttner-Gymnasium Babelsberg
• SCOALA GIMNAZIALA FERDINAND I