Robots friends of the planet

Students at CEIP La Angostura de Santa Brígida school (Gran Canaria) are really worried about the damage caused to the planet as a consequence of human action. In order to face this problem, they designed the project Let's be friends of the Earth, which deals with the environment, its protection and the changes caused by the effects of natural processes and human action.

ATOM, a new way to study mathematics

Did you know that numbers can be amusing, bad tempered or mischievous? This is something that the ATOM project from the Alonso de Madrigal School in Madrid and its Rumanian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Italian and Greek partners tells its participants. Using a multidisciplinary approach the boys and girls have discovered that mathematics are more part of their lives than they had imagined.

Thanks to good planning and close collaboration among the teachers from the different participating countries, ATOM has proposed a great variety of activities related to this Science discipline. Mathematics have escaped from their books to meet up with poetry, art or cooking. The result is surprising. A pizza or some spaghetti become ingredients for devising mathematical puzzles. An example: calculate the area of a rectangle using 400 grams of this delicious pasta.

The project stands out, not only because of the variety of the tools used, but also because they are included in the whole working process in a creative fashion. For example, the pupils introduce themselves with interactive characters and films created with applications like VOKI. By way of these virtual animations they tell their partners about their age, their hobbies, etc. in a very attractive manner.

In ATOM, the students, between 12 and 16, actively look for information to discover different things, like for example that the golden rectangle was the geometric shape that the Ancient Greeks liked most. But the most outstanding aspect of the project is linked to the mathematical puzzles that the pupils of one country set for their partners. The result, a project in which collaboration is present all the time as are ICTs when the efforts of the pupils are recorded in videos and image galleries which they upload to the TwinSpace. This is how the new technologies and mathematics manage to introduce themselves into the learning process of the students in the most natural way imaginable.

The cultural exchanges happen almost spontaneously. But they go a step further in the case of ATOM. Mathematics enter into the traditions, recipes and stories which the participants share. They not only bring them closer together but each of them learns from their partners. Puzzles, jigsaws and an endless number of enjoyable activities complete this initiative to get the boys and girls hooked on mathematics.

Be cool. Don't smoke

When it comes to starting an eTwinning project, there are two main factors to be considered: choosing the topic to be dealt with for several months and planning the tasks as a guideline sheet. That is why this month we are highlighting Be cool. Don't smoke. This project has just been opened for students, but teachers have been preparing the activities on Twinspace for weeks by using various tools: wiki, forum, image gallery, content viewer to show videos... The project can be followed up through Facebook, where a page has been opened.

Everything is ready for students and teachers from Turkey, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Spain (Ciudad de Dalías Secondary School). The idea is to improve young people's quality of life by pushing them away from tobacco. Just by gaining awareness of how harmful tobacco can be for our health, it can be eliminated. Students will work with images, videos, stories, games and advertising campaigns.

En la Red, que no te pesquen

This month we are highlighting a project which has only just started, because of the importance of the topic it deals with.  En la Red, que no te pesquen is an eTwinning project in Spanish being developed by four schools in Spain, Portugal and Sweden. Its design consists of a plan of diverse activities through which the pupils immerse themselves in the problems which derive from the use and abuse of Internet by young people today. All this is done with a participatory and collaborative working methodology.

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