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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - iMuSciCA (Interactive Music Science Collaborative Activities)

Teaser

Summary

iMuSciCA (Interactive Music Science Collaborative Activities) is among the first European projects attempting to develop a creative educational platform for the STEAM framework for implementation in real educational settings. STEAM is an educational movement from the US that has gained momentum in European educational systems and seeks to break down the boundaries between technical subjects and the arts. STEAM pedagogy is a rather new pedagogical approach trying to bring arts to the heart of STEM subjects with the cross-fertilisation of the two domains that are so far mistakenly considered irrelevant. The iMuSciCA project addresses the current requirements in STEAM education and learning for new pedagogical methodologies and innovative educational technology tools by supporting active, discovery-based, personalized, and more engaging learning and providing students and teachers with opportunities for collaboration, co-creation and collective knowledge building. The projectâ€™s key objectives are summarized below:
- Develop and explore original and innovative enabling technologies to facilitate open co-creation tools incorporated in music activities to support STEM learning, thus providing indications of the positive impact of art and science interaction on creativity and innovation.
- Develop a set of practical activities to give learners the opportunity to discover about different phenomena/laws of physics, geometry, mathematics and technology through creative music activities, to examine them from various viewpoints and increase integration among various subjects of the curriculum contributing to innovative cross-disciplinary educational approaches.
- Encourage students to engage in innovative interactive music activities with advanced multimodal interfaces that enable them to discover new ways to look at science with the support of creative and artistic interventions, raising their interest in science and technology.
- Enable teachers to design meaningful and engaging project-based, problem-based STEAM learning activities; to reinforce them in producing rewarding and self-fulfilling teaching work by acquiring and integrating innovative and stimulating educational technologies in their teaching practice.
- Provide teachers with a coherent and rigorous set of lesson plans that can inspire them to bring STEAM learning to their classes.
The main outputs of iMuSciCA include:
- A workbench of music activities containing methodological and advocacy tools of advanced enabling technologies to assist learners in developing co-creative processes for STEAM learning.
- Cross-disciplinary lesson plans for secondary education to teach physics, geometry, mathematics and technology combined with creative music activities.
- Professional development material for teachers and educators for adopting innovative STEAM teaching methodology.

Work performed

The iMuSciCA work plan is covering a runtime of 30 months conceived in three phases to accommodate specific implementation needs and optimize interaction and integration among the different components of the project, ensuring the achievement of the expected outcomes. An innovative STEAM pedagogical framework, a set of educational scenarios that is compatible with the iMuSciCA STEAM pedagogy and the iMuSciCA workbench that integrates innovative core enabling technologies are the main outcomes of the project in this period. In addition, iMuSciCA workbench and educational scenarios have been pilot tested in secondary primary schools in three European countries and a number of teacher workshops have been implemented to give the opportunity to teachers across Europe to try out the iMuSciCA workbench, to come across the STEAM pedagogy and the designed educational scenarios as well as provide their feedback to the educational and technological aspects of iMuSciCA.

Final results

iMuSciCA lies in the heart of STEAM learning, since it introduces new methods and cutting-edge technologies for integrating music into STEM activities, simulating the ways in which subjects naturally connect in the real world. At the same time the proposed suite of tools, integrated in the iMuSciCA workbench, are appropriately integrated in blended learning scenarios, allowing thus for more engaging and personalized learning. Collaborative learning and a shift from â€˜students as consumersâ€™ to â€˜students as creatorsâ€™ are expected to have a mid-term impact on education. iMuSciCA complies with both trends. The proposed pedagogical scenarios are mainly collaborative, i.e. students are expected to collaboratively investigate, design and compose. iMuSciCA, however, goes beyond collaborative learning and introduces collaborative teaching as well, since teachers from different disciplines are expected to collaboratively implement the proposed educational scenarios.
With music being one the emerging tools for stimulating learning awareness, the iMuSciCA project develops learning skills associated with both the science of acoustics and the art of music creation. iMuSciCA offers a workbench that allows sonification of audio parameters within a virtual sound-simulation environment for designing virtual music instruments. The sounding-body of an instrument, as the fundamental element of both the nature of sound and that of the art of music making, is placed in the heart of inquiry-based teaching practices concerning sound waves. The workbench explore the direct link between a virtual object and its detailed profile of scientific data that govern its sounding behaviour. An advanced virtual 3D modelling environment connected to real physics and signal processing modules supports teacherâ€™s intention to create an immersive experience of sound production and analysis for the students. Bridging the gap between the typology of physics and the reproduction of its parameters in real life, the lesson plans of iMuSciCA follow the needs of an inquiry-based approach upon this particular curriculum.
Although knowledge and skills of people are important and even necessary, they are not sufficient to create a prosperous society where people are satisfied with their lives. It becomes more and more clear that a key factor to prosperous societies is the room they give to human creativity and expression. This is precisely what iMuSciCA projects provides: it combines the knowledge about STEM with the creativity of building musical instruments that will make musical expression possible. Moreover, by bringing contemporary technologies into the classroom (like gesture recognition and the like) musical expression will become possible also for the ones not so gifted in music. This opening to co-creation is just made possible by modern technology, a typical STEM subject. So a double intertwining is incorporated in iMuSciCA as it connects creativity and art to STEM precisely by means of STEM. Art and STEM resonate to each other and show how the creativity of art is fostered into creativity of STEAM. The pedagogy of iMuSciCA and the implementation in pilot testing in real classroom setting reflects the co-creative interplay between art and science in society.