BEACONING, Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning, sets a forefront in multifaceted education technologies through large-scale piloting of a digital learning platform that blend physical and digital spaces. As innovation action strategies, pilots combine opportunities for new ICTs in multiple ways that merge learning acquired in formal, non-formal and informal means, developing the skills for today’s abled and disabled learners and workforce. The BEACONING platform will be a ubiquitous solution that exploits advances in user experience design, mobile communication, location-based and context aware systems, procedural content generation, pedagogy-driven gamification, learning analytics and cloud technology though innovative integration towards a blended learning space. The BEACONING demonstrator will facilitate, assess and author gamified learning activities, integrating existing educational tools and services of the participating organisations.
Focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the cross-subject approach embedded in a Problem-Based Learning model will contextualise learning within real world problem solving and applications. The role of learners is amplified in the process of filtering and connecting concepts framed under practical, investigative and exploratory scenarios. Large-scale pilots will validate and inform the development of the BEACONING ecosystem that democratises learning across and among fully abled and those with mild to moderate physical and mental impairments (age 15 to 24), undergoing general and vocational training. BEACONING anticipates the benefits of making cross-subject matter more understandable, fostering the application of subject specialism to other domains. The pilot substantiates the technical and economic viability and the impact of the innovative platform to strategise market adoption and replication. By integrating experiences in a highly engaging, contextualized and personalised manner, learning can beyond the barriers of space and time.
BEACONING comprises 15 partners from 9 countries:
e-UCM is lead responsible for WP2 – Dissemination and Communication whose main objective is to incresase the visibility of the project and to ensure that the outcomes of the project have a significant impact across Europe. In the medium and long term, the aim of this WP is to create and nurture the core of an ecosystem that will guarantee sustainability and adoption of project results in real contexts. The target audience will be as broad as possible, with a focus on both academia and industry.
e-UCM is also responsible for the Learning Semantics System and Learning Analytics. The back end services for game analytics and adaptation will collect data from the heterogeneous sources of the BEACONING ecosystem, so that intelligent processing techniques can be applied. To feed the data collecting backend services, the different games and components within the BEACONING ecosystem must be able to trace the interactions and communicate with the services in a standardized way. To facilitate this integration, a collection of open source reference implementation of the game analytics component will be constructed and published, so that game developers can use them out of the box or adapt them to their own technical requirements with reduced effort.
Check out the BEACONING promo video.
For further information check out the H2020 BEACONING webpage.
