The first year of the project - Italy
SCUOLA SECONDARIA DI PRIMO GRADO
“Giovanni Bovio”
Foggia – Italy
ERASMUS + “EUROLAND” PROJECT ASSESSMENT OF THE FIRST YEAR
Our school along with Escola pùblica “Mestres Montana” (Catalonia) and Scoala Gimnaziala “Mihai Eminescu” (Romania) have exchanged good practices in active experimentation, manipulation, symbolization, abstraction and generalization in order to extend this new methodology to the rest of the Maths fields such as Geometry. We have also included robotics, improved ICT and foreign language skills to be expanded to different subjects.
Three classes of our school take part in the project: class 1B, class 1D and class 1E. The students are aged 11 years old and it is their first year in our school after the primary one. At the beginning of the project we have introduced our school and students with a “Who is who?” video, located the schools on a European map, and prepared the students and teachers of the workshop for the first short-term exchange. We have held a meeting with the parents and the educational community to explain the project deeply and disseminated the phases of the project. We have also invited the media and published an article. Every activity has been uploaded in our Erasmus blog and Twinspace.
From 27th to 29th November 2018 we had our first short-term exchanges of groups of pupils in Foggia- Italy where we experienced our workshops 1: geometry by Romania, manipulative maths by Catalonia and robotics by Italy. We did all the activities planned except the presentation of the city with a map of the city with QR code. We couldn’t meet that target because the short-term exchange was fixed only two months after the opening of our school, the teacher involved in that task had moved to another school and no teacher specialized in that field had arrived yet. Moreover, during the days of the visit of the town, the weather was terrible: rainy, windy and cold and it was very difficult and dangerous for the students’ health to walk round the city with that nasty weather. Only the last day was sunny and we enjoyed a trip to the coast, Manfredonia.
After the short-term exchange we have shared with the rest of the school the workshops done and implemented in our classes the worksheets our partners delivered us. Later on, we have done other videos and challenges like “A day in our school”, “How much water do we waste when we brush our teeth?”, “Are the shadows the same in every country?”, how we celebrate Easter in our countries and so on. Definitely the most interesting one up to now is challenge 3. We have built a robot with legos and this activity was found to be interesting for our students who have assembled a robot that dances, obeys orders and talks. Even if lessons were over, they kept coming to give life to the robot called “Meccanoid”. They made corns on their hands not even knowing how to use a screwdriver and, thanks to the help of our robotics experts Nino Nesta and Valentino Aquilano, they have programmed the robot and achieved positive results. In June we have had an exhibition at school where we have showed the works done. Video about the event has been uploaded on our Erasmus+ sites.
Generally speaking we must consider this first year experience in a very positive way. Teachers and students have worked a lot to fulfill the activities, challenges and tasks required. During the final assessment (end of the school year in June) all teachers of the three classes have emphasized that their students are more confident in scientific subjects and foreign language. Comparing the basic competences test results with those of the beginning of the school year (it is their first year at our school), they have evaluated most of them with excellent marks which means an increase of their competences.
Everything was planned in the right way and we have done our best to finish our activities on time. In this way, we don’t think we have to rearrange any aspect for the following year.