On 24 and 25 September the SPARK partners met in Leeuwarden, hosted by Stichting Incubator. Two days of work with colleagues from the Netherlands, Malta, Italy and Lithuania, with one question running through it: how do we turn our research into materials a teacher can walk into class with on Monday morning.
The research is in
The European synthesis report is ready in draft. It brings together the surveys among students, teachers and companies in all participating countries: what young people know about money, where they get stuck, and what the labour market expects of them. Partners are now reviewing their national chapters, translations follow, and the report will be final by the end of October.
What is being built
- A Moodle learning environment, hosted on our own server in the Netherlands, with interactive H5P exercises, school accounts and video tutorials.
- Lesson modules in two versions: one to teach in class and one for students to work through on their own, with voice-over and a teacher guide.
- A virtual escape room as the capstone of the learning path, where students bring everything together in one challenge.
- Eight animated videos in four languages, from November onwards.
The materials are made for students aged 13 to 17, with the emphasis on 14 to 16. In total SPARK will reach more than three hundred of them.
Agreements on AI and sources
Part of the second day was about how the materials are produced. The partners agreed that lesson modules will not rely on cloud AI services, that only verified open educational resources are used, and that every text and image is checked by a person. Images created with AI are labelled as such. SOML safeguards this part of the project.
What happens next
Each partner school will host a session this autumn to show the materials to colleagues. The next online meeting is on 27 October. Everything the project produces will be freely available under an open licence, through sparksteam.eu and the SPARK project page.