08/04/2011 - Courses for Teachers, Projects
European project KeyTTT: educational robotics at the space camp in Turkey
Reading time: 2 minutesKeyTTT European Project aims to identify useful practices at European level, for mathematics and science teaching, and eveloping key skills in terms of lifelong learning. The collaboration between the EuroPole (project leader) and the School of Robotics brought teachers from several European Nations to educational robotics clkasses at Space Camp, Izmir, Turkey, 11-16 of April.
KeyTTT European Project: Teamwork, Training and technology for development of Key Competences Project
The Recommendations of the European Parliament on key competencies for lifelong learning released in 2006 summarise a noticeable tendency in the policies of the educational authorities across Europe many of which had redefined their educational aims in terms of competencies, increasingly focusing the curricula on the successful application of knowledge and skills rather than on simple transmission of knowledge. This tendency places increased demands towards teachers who are entitled to develop in their students’ practical skills for life and to assist young people to reach their full potential. Initiated in the European year of creativity and Innovation the KeyTTT project aims to support teachers in this challenge by producing an integrated solution that consists of teaching Methodology, Teachers’ Guidelines Book and Qualification Teacher Course addressed to teachers in mathematics and natural sciences who work in the course of the lower secondary education. The aim of the project is to equip teachers with tools that will help them to organise educational process oriented at learning as problem-solving or research-in-action activities that support and develop students’ creativity and key competencies such as basic competencies in science, maths and technology, digital competence, learning to learn, sense of initiative and entrepreneurship. The project intends to build up on up good practices created in school and out of school environment, incl. in projects’ settings. It will launch a multilingual web-site with educational recourses and innovative teaching materials.
The selected competences are:
- 1. communication in the mother tongue;
- 2. communication in foreign languages;
- 3. mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology;
- 4. digital competence;
- 5. learning to learn;
- 6. social and civic competences;
- 7. spirit of initiative and entrepreneurship;
- 8. cultural awareness and expression.
These skills are based on three fundamental aspects of the life of each person:
• self fulfilment and personal development (cultural capital);
• active citizenship and integration (social capital);
• the employability (human capital).
How can the educational robotics develop these skills?
The use of educational robotics as a teaching method encourages students in guided discovery and in problem solving; students get used to work in groups to solve problems,
find solutions and verify the results.
Robot Kits Lego Mindstorms® and Lego WeDo® which our school bought are commonly associated with games. Robots indeed, go beyond the recreational aspect, and they can
combine the reconstruction of the knowledge they got during the various school activities, with creation, invention and new keys in the revival of the concepts and techniques
acquired. In this way you can achieve multiple types of intelligences that characterize our pupils: linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, just to name a few.
And moreover. The educational robotics at Fumane Secondary School is used to perform multi-disciplinary courses, what is technically called CLIL: robotics courses in English with
students from other European schools.
Some classes of our students, infact, participated to interactive lessons in video/webconference with Bulgarian and Polish classes. Using a platform for video
conferencing and a shared Interactive White Board (IWB) Italian and foreign students can work at a common lesson communicating in a foreign language (English, at the moment).
The experience made so far has found an enthusiastic participation of students (Italians and foreigners), and of some teachers. The subject was the discovery of the cause-effect
relationships related to sensors set on the robot.
Robotics was also the subject of a common lesson for Italian and French students from Nantes, guests in Fumane during a school Exchange; in English again.
Robotics is therefore useful in order to build networks of relationships between students and teachers from different schools. The Comprehensive School "B. Lorenzi "hosted, at the end
of September, a seminar on Educational Robotics, which involved teachers from different schools spread in the Veneto Area.
Today we speak about educational robotics as a teaching tool, maybe in a few years it will become a discipline to deal with since the first classes of primary school.
Meanwhile, some taste of robotics (in the form of play and creation) was also brought to the kindergarten Fumane, with the help of some older students of the secondary school.
Robotics as a tool for continuity and a means to create links among different school levels.
(by Tullia Urschitz)