Designing the Future Project Update – December 2022
The world’s first text message was sent in December 1992. It’s a technology that most of us don’t raise an eyebrow about, it almost feels like we’ve always been able to use our phones to send text messages.
Would you be surprised if we told you that a patent for 3D printers was already granted in 1986 and that the first commercial 3D printers were released already in 1987 – 1988?
Although commercial use existed in the late 80s, the accessibility in our curricula nowadays is not at the level we wished. Of course, development has come a long way in terms of the specific areas of use and the teachers in these subjects have a high level of knowledge and ability to teach them. But when it comes to other areas such as languages or humanities subjects, there are many teachers who need more knowledge in both programming and 3D printing to be able to incorporate new technologies into lessons.
The partners within this EU project are Szkoła Podstawowa z Oddziałami Integracyjnymi nr 12 from Poland, Ozel Yedisu Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi from Türkiye, MULTI-ACT STD from Türkiye, Narva Soldino Gümnasium from Estonia, Lusófona University – COFAC from Portugal, CIAPE from Italy and Learnmera Oy from Finland.
Our project aims to reduce this knowledge gap for teachers, students, and other stakeholders, regardless of subject area. This will be explored through extensive Learning Teaching Training Activities (LTTAs) and the experiences & knowledge will be shared on multiplier events and other activities.
The project will generate a training program based on the Scratch and Tinkercad programming languages as well as an Ebook that will contain all the activities that have been carried out in the LTTAs and virtual meetings. The result will also increase the digital literacy and readiness which is also very important to reach our end result of the project.
As teachers, we are not necessarily at the highest level of digital skills, but we want to ensure that – through the project – we also help to improve every participants’ digital literacy in one way or another.
Our first LTTA took place in November at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. We all got our first opportunity to meet as partners in person and not least to familiarise ourselves with the technology and programming required to be able to use 3D.
It was at the same time an overwhelming experience for us with slightly poorer digital knowledge, but above all both important and very interesting. We had the most amazing opportunity to follow the process from programming, creating a 3D model in a program, to actually seeing it printed.
Our next LTTA will take place in Turkey in December and in Italy in January, and we are all looking forward to some new challenges in the digital world.Interested to learn more about the project?
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