GIJÓN/XIXÓN’S Second OPPORTUNITY School  was founded in 2001. It is PROMOTED by the municipality of Gijón through the Local Agency FOR Economic Promotion and Employment, the municipality itself and European funding for concrete actions.

GIJÓN/XIXÓN’S Second OPPORTUNITY School defines itself as a transitional resource to help young people between 14 and 25, who have difficulties and want to be helped, giving special attention to EDUCATION and employment as an important resource for socialization. Following the principles of the new “Skills Agenda for Europe”, that states 16 million jobs requiring ICT skills are expected by 2020, and also that nowadays  90% of the jobs need basic ICT skills, we’VE decideD to offer more workshops linked to technology and IT Skills.

We've JOINED the European Project “Make, Learn, Share: Europe” where we HAVE ALREADY developed two Open School Units (OSU):

-VIDEOGAME PROGRAMMING: “Construct 2” is a powerful groundbreaking HTML5 game creator designed specifically for 2D games. It allows anyone to build games, without PRIOR coding knowledge.

-DRONES: THE OSU’S DEVELOPMENT HAS BEEN BASED ON THE ASSEMBLY PROCESS OF A SPECIFIC DO-IT-YOURSELF MODEL OF DRONE. THE YOUNG PARTICIPANTS HAVE BUILT THE DRONE STARTING WITH ELECTRONIC PARTS, INTEGRATING THEM BY FOLLOWING THEIR MENTOR’S GUIDELINES. ONCE FINISHED, THEY CONFIGURATED THE FLIGHT CONSOLE FOLLOWED BY DOING AN EXPERIMENTAL FLIGHT WITH IT. THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS THE PARTICIPANTS HAVE ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE ABOUT ELECTRONICS, PROGRAMMING AND FLIGHT CONFIGURATIONS.

These two workshops were improved and reinforceD with others that helped SPARK the interest of our young students in BOTH new technologies and  IctS, so they can act as IT ambassadors among their families, friends and classmates.

augmented and virtual reality workshop:

augmented reality refers to the technology that allows the inclusion of virtual data (be it through text, hyperlinks, audio, video, multimedia...) taken from one object in real life. thus, a smartphone, table or computer, or other devices.

virtual reality is based on substituting reality through devices that allow us to “feel” we are in another place, but without interacting with objects from the real world.

the themes covered in the workshop were:

1. creation of augmented reality.
2. virtual reality and virtua reality headsets.
3. using “Aurasma” as a method to create augmented reality.
4. differences between virtual reality and augmented reality.
5. creating multimedia elements.
6. creating texts using the “Word” and “prezi” programmes.
7. using “Kahoot”.

the main goal of all this work is to bring technological knowledge closer to the young people participating in the second opportunity school to promote their interest about it and about the professional profiles that work closely with it. the workshops serve as a reason to motivate these young people, who are in risk of early school leaving, to continue their studies and understand the employment potential and future of the technology sector.