The project brings several cultures together through similar students and teachers interest which is robotics. Thanks to our project we want to demonstrate that technology becomes a common language spoken worldwide.
The immediate need for starting the international cooperation and writing the project was one of the objectives of the Comenius Programme, such as development of young people of our schools in different areas of education, the desire to understand other cultures and establish new friendships based on common interests. The project should discover in young people the need to absorb knowledge from different domains. It means that technicians should create a community not limited to technical-oriented subjects but have good general knowledge on European countries, their traditions, history, politics.
We are convinced that thanks to technology it is possible to make students of different ages, education and backgrounds work together. It means that thanks to the project students will broaden their educational horizons, focus not only on technology and science (robotics, physics, mathematics, mechanics, programming, multimedia production, website creation, etc.) but also acquire additional knowledge which are the humanities (foreign languages, history, culture, arts, civics, geography and even theology and sociology). It also means they will have a chance to become broadly educated and to create a society of technical intelligence.
All those goals will be accomplished through common action, e.g. building a website, preparing documentation and works (on robotics, European culture, traditions, etc. ), communication between partners, mobilities, visiting interesting places. Teachers of different subjects (technical and general) are engaged. Students of technical schools teach their colleagues the principles of robotics. There are six partners involved in the project (Poland, Italy, Portugal, Estonia, Lithuania, Spain), the language of communication is English.
The project assumes evaluation on students and teachers level and also dissemination of the results.
Objectives of partnership and subjects to address:
-promoting the spirit of widely-educated society (technicians with good knowledge of the humanities, general-educated graduates with bases of tech. knowledge)-workshops, visits;
-tech. and scientific education through innovative approaches taken from robotics at any level of educational system (build robots, program, make measurements, use ICT in everyday life)
-workshops, projects;
-cultural exchange (by learning history, traditions, habits, civics, geography of partner countries, tech. development)
-visits, discussions, workshops, projects;
-language learning and linguistic diversity (project held in English, CLIL, on-line tech. dictionary-apx. 100 terms) and breaking the language barriers (work in internat. groups), achieving level B2, teachers improve their language holding lessons in English;
-promoting cooperation, creativity, personal fulfillment and growth of an entrepreneurial spirit through common creation of work and documentation;
-supporting the development and using of ICT-based contents through Open Source tools (creating website, videoconferences, text, image and video edition, cloud computing)-workshops, projects;
-paying attention to timeless matters (role of religion, God, cloning, euthanasia, advanced medicine, biology, physics, artificial intelligence and its danger, replacing humans by robots, human endurance and organism efficiency in sport, doping, life without computers and new tech.)-discussions, projects, creating articles as a documentation;
-achieving an increased awareness of students (learning abroad, new perspectives for future careers, quality of life) and teachers (comparing teaching methods and curriculum) about the importance of European cooperation, sharing information.
There were groups of students (any school 50 students and 5 teachers in two years) in the project that had specific tasks to do. Their work was supervised by the coordinators. Communication was ensured through modern means of transmission, video conferencing, email, instant messaging and website. Cooperation was also accomplished by frequent access to the website itself, where students and teachers virtually met and worked together.
During the meetings dominated Interactive communication techniques, teamwork, brainstorming and debates.
Who has access to the project site will realize how rewarding it was working on a project that involved six cultures, quite distinct from each other, and used robotics as a common language. It will also be obvious to realize that it is worth associating with other people that develops common interest and works on European scale.