The international project team is meeting regularly each month to discuss the progress in the project, plan the upcoming activities and solve questions or problems that partners encounter. Each partner is usually represented by 1-3 team members, including the project coordinator responsible for the management, and teacher(s) involved in the intellectual activities of the project. This way, we get a complete view of the project’s local activities and have a possibility to reach mutual decisions effectively.
This month, the meeting was held on April 9th and was dedicated to sharing progress with the development of lesson materials. Partners responsible for this task (Robotikos mokykla, MCAST and IT4Kids) presented updates of the materials and informed about the planned time for completing new pieces.
At the same time, testing the produced materials lesson-by-lesson is taking place at partner schools KITM, Sedu, TAI (Turku) and MCAST. This additional testing, which was not planned in the application, gives instant feedback from the users of the materials in order to make necessary changes and upgrades of the product.
Timo Paakkanen presented the feedback from teachers and students received from the questionnaires after testing particular lessons. Participating teachers also pointed out useful remarks and recommendations for the development. Some general remarks were expressed that vocational students require less theory, less academic language and more learning through practical tasks and assignments.
Produced lesson materials on all three topics will also be tested in full scope with target group pupils in the next school year (2021-2022). This will provide a good evaluation of the quality and impact of the new study unit “Introduction to AI’.