MinT – Migration in neue Technologien Erasmus Project

Project Title

MinT – Migration in neue Technologien

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 Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Project Summary

Introduction. The so-called refugee crisis in Europe of 2015 is the overall contextual setting of the project: Thousands of youngsters were on their long way to Europe seeking for a better and in particular safer future. Societies of receiving western European countries are now facing the challenges of integrating these visitors. As part of society, schools (such as the August-Griese-Berufskolleg, AGB) also do their jobs by establishing so-called international classes (IK) since early 2016 to educate the refugees in the German language at first place. As an upper secondary vocational college our second task is to deliver basic work-related skills to the displaced persons. As the AGB is strongly targeting the field of IT (information technology), a key branch of the future, there was so far no didactic concept available to motivate the fugitives approaching this sector of industry.
Thus, one of the main goals of the present project in close collaboration with the Swedish Teknikum was the development of a simple didactic vehicle in order to teach the IT basics and especially the fundamentals of microcontroller programming in a funny and simple way. As we noticed, our didactic vehicle worked out fine in transmitting fundamental skills to the IK students at AGB.
As the Teknikum in southern Sweden has been facing the same challenges in terms of integration by education, the european colleagues appeared to be the best choice as a collaborative partner. Similarly, in addition to a focus on computer science the Swedes also have a branch within their educational system mainly tackling handiworks. This implies that this was the ideal partner in order to construct suitable a chassis for the coming Arduino product.
Prior to the construction and programming of the didactic arduino vehicle we had a long planning phase. During this meticulous planning the students involved in the project got in touch with each other via numerous skype meetings and several email correspondences in order to get to know their partners. In the daily lessons at school, the basics of programming and profound background knowledge on migration have been taught: Historical contexts, economic reasons as well as ethical challenges have been addressed. All these topics have been covered and structured by an extremely novel didactic concept called ‘Self-Organized-Learning’ (SOL) enabling the students to get their duties done in time.
Besides the field trips happened in advance, the two encounters in November 2017 in Växjö (Sweden) and in March 2018 in Löhne (Germany) depicting the main activities of the project. On the first meeting, three didactic vehicles to deliver basic IT knowledge to the IK students have been constructed in an impressively short period of time (less than a week) by the project students. The second meeting was focussing the tutorial setting and the question of how to teach the IK students use and program the arduino constructions. During the same week also several day trips around the topic of migration and information technology have been conducted.
Finally the German and the Swedish project students decided to use two very suitable arduino projects for their teaching lesson: A newly and from-scratch- developed ‘Tic Tac Toe’- game as well as a ‘Four in a row’ game fully programmed and electronically wired and also wooden chassis built. Also the entire game logics and winning conditions have planned and realized using their formerly learnt programming language. Our students managed to significantly and especially measurable increase and drag the interest of the migrant students towards IT. A large majority of the refugee students could easily imagine to enter the IT field after graduation.
The didactic concept developed within the present project is absolutely suitable for other types of schools and can easily be adapted to their specific needs in terms of specialisation (eg. biology, psychology, social sciences…). In particular it is interesting for people who don’t know what to expect if they enter the field of computer science in High School preparing for university entry. We have finally developed a blueprint to successfully introduce a (almost any) complex topic to an audience which has absolutely no idea of. In case of the AGB, it is a matter of fact that the project results will be used in our daily classes for the next couple of years.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 43635 Eur

Project Coordinator

August-Griese-Berufskolleg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Teknikum