Erasmus+ KA2 Strategic Partnership - D.E.L.T.A. project about Work based Learning and inoffensive drones for STEM didactics
At the threshold of 2020, the EU scenario in terms of education and vocational training shows a gap: on the one hand, the strong pressure of the labor market which is the constant and growing search for profiles with strong STEM skills (mathematics, science, techniques and engineering); on the other hand, there is an inadequate level of STEM skills in the secondary cycle student population, in which about 22% is below the average of skills and knowledge with respect to their European peers, with peaks of 36% in the case of a partner disadvantage -cheap. A gap that widens further if we consider the gender gap, due to the fact that a still insufficient number of girls approach the technical-scientific culture.
As a result, while 90% of jobs in the next 10 years will require STEM skills, with over 7 million jobs available or being created in this area, it is estimated that the disalignment between education and the labor market costs to the EU the lack of 825,000 skilled workers.
To tackle these critical issues, the EU 2020 strategy, already expressed in the "Joint Report of the Council of the ET 2020 - New priorities for European Cooperation in Education and Training (2015) focuses on a innovative concept of education and training:
- hoping for an educational process more focused on the learner and personalized, also with a view to overcoming the gender disparity in access to the fields of knowledge STEM
- betting on technology as a tool able to connect theory and practice, STEM subjects and concrete objects in the physical space, as well as the training path and the career path
- rehabilitating and enhance non-formal and informal learning paths, to complement traditional theoretical and frontal learning
- Work-based learning is promoted in the form of self-managed project work by learners, as a tool to recover and reinforce the motivation of disadvantaged students or students with low academic performance
- A new role is proposed for VET teachers, who become facilitators and mediators of the learning process, rather than knowledge providers, also thanks to the updating of teaching and pedagogical methods
From these assumptions the idea of the DELTA project was born, which aims to make an innovation contribution to technical and professional training courses at European level, promoting the learning of the STEM curricular disciplines through the work based learning methodology, through the use of harmless drones as a technology in use.
It should be pointed out right away that drones are not the end of learning, but the means that allows secondary school students to deal with mathematical-scientific disciplines, often perceived as difficult and discouraging, through a technology applicable to concrete aspects of everyday life , transferable to a context of participatory and collaborative learning, in which students are placed in a community of practices in which they take personal responsibility for and personalize their study path.
According to MIT Technology Review of 2014 (10 Breakthrough technologies) the drones would have become one of the 10 technological innovations with the greatest impact on the world economy, and the forecasts were not slow to come true. Drones are proving to be strategic for many harmless and civil purposes: rescue missions after catastrophic events, such as earthquakes and the transport of life-saving drugs; mapping of buildings to identify risks related to asbestos; environmental monitoring to avoid deforestation and hydrogeological risks; security control in high-traffic public places such as stations, airports, events; border control; urban and interurban traffic monitoring; video footage for film and documentary activities; precision agriculture; transport and delivery of light goods.
The idea behind the project is the adoption of inoffensive drone technology as a means to improve STEM skills in VET students and to develop technical and professional skills that prepare them to enter the labor market more easily by strengthening their employability. The technology of drones is combined with many aspects present in the European STEM curriculum, easily exploitable and transferable in terms of construction of teacher-led educational programs, invested with a new role of facilitator of learning, bringing theory to laboratory practice. The application of STEM theory to a real object will help teachers to involve and motivate students, especially those with low profit and / or special needs and learning difficulties. In fact, it is believed that VET students are more inclined to learn theoretical concepts through practical activities than through traditional teaching methods in which the teacher only explains concepts and assigns tasks and exercises.
On the basis of STEM educational programs developed by the teaching staff in a teacher-led perspective, the students cooperated in a community of practices inserted in a situated learning context that simulates the work-place, to study, disassemble and build inoffensive drones or parts of they, according to a logic of work-based learning.
The general structure of the D.E.L.T.A. project has planned to proceed according to the logic of the industrialization of a harmless drone, identified in the phase of operational co-planning thanks to the synergy between educational and training institutions on the one hand (P1 Coordinator + P10 University of Porto), and on the other the business oriented partner with special reference to P2 Aerodron by virtue of the specific skills of the sector.
In production, in fact, a harmless drone must be:
1) Designed, manufactured and assembled
2) Configured from the point of view of the software, determining the conditions for the study and processing of data on the ground
3) Configured from an electronic point of view, identifying and implementing the devices to be installed on board
4) Scheduled to follow the correct flight plan trajectory
5) Planned to carry out a mission identified according to a useful application for civil and / or industrial purposes.
The students, organized in work groups that identify an emerging community of cognitive apprenticeship practices, are confronted with a concrete problem to be solved, linked to the construction or study of a harmless drone or its components. Immediately they must activate prior knowledge related to their informal or non-formal knowledge, as well as to formal languages learned in the institutional educational context, cooperating to identify applications, strategies and techniques to obtain the solution to the problem faced. In this way they pass from "knowing what / to" to "knowing how" a phenomenon occurs or manifests itself.
Each phase of the drone industrialization process lends itself to multiple modes of use within the VET educational curriculum, since it requires the study and mastery of formal mathematical-scientific languages, both the predisposition of a learning environment that simulates the organization socio-technical work-place.
Through the phases of the D.E.L.T.A. project, thanks to the interdisciplinary approach, the VET students were able to develop:
a) Professional skills relating to key technologies of the digital age, such as information technology for on-shore processing of data collected by the in-flight drone (IO2) and electronics for the assembly on board of aircraft of cameras, components of sensors (multi-spectrum, thermal, "sense & avoid" vision for in-flight interaction) and geolocation (IO3);
b) STEM curricular competences: engineering for the design, production and maintenance of inoffensive drones (IO1); mathematics, through trigonometry for setting the flight plan, and 3D modeling through the point cloud for volumetric calculations and remote sensing (IO4); physical and natural sciences to contextualise the problems that can be faced thanks to the technology in use - such as precision agriculture, environmental and hydrological monitoring (IO5).
All Intellectual Outputs can be downloaded for free from the website of the Coordinator of the project, Cisita Parma scarl, Parma, Italy at the URL https://www.cisita.parma.it/cisita/progetti-internazionali/progetto-eramus-ka2-delta/