rAn – Raising awareness about natural disasters through the development of best practices and serious games

The rAn solution targets the European education and training community as a whole by fostering the enhancement of the proposed curriculum and tools. In primary education, for instance, a core concern is when and how to introduce such issues. This decision is important in order not to frighten children and young people, but to empower them to understand, critically engage with and tackle environmental change and natural phenomena.

Educators at all levels will also need support and training to deliver quality education about complex, climate related topics in ways which are both relevant to local environmental, social and political contexts, and which meet wider educational targets (e.g. literacy, numeracy, citizenship).

The rAn project mainly aims to develop:

• A “natural disasters awareness kit” and a serious game that promote awareness of young people in the field of natural disasters and measures, tools and practices for either predicting/preventing or facing hazardous situations.
• Learning methodologies and best practices that promote “”hands-on”” experiential learning scenarios, critical thinking and problem-based learning. Such methods draw their content from real-world practices and needs, promote knowledge abstraction, encourage the deployment of state-of-the-art technological tools and methods. They tend to foster the creation of concrete representations for a plethora of science concepts (coding, mathematics, mechanics etc.) through active role playing.
• Learning scenarios and puzzles that encourage either Computational Thinking (Coding, IoT) principles and processes as well as “”smart””, modern and responsible solutions for the aforementioned problem(s) in a digital environment
• An active community of practice for teachers that will be interested in disseminating the aforementioned concepts, tools and practices among stakeholders that come from the field of education.”