How special are your needs? Can we help? STEAM for an inclusive Europe!

Our project started from the observation that in this fast evolving 21st century certain people are at risk of being left behind. And we especially thought of people with special needs and elderly people who might experience mobility problems, lack of social interaction and inability to fully participate in everything our quickly evolving society has to offer. We focussed on the level to which our society is accessible in all its forms, not just in how far city planning takes these needs into account, but also in how far people’s daily life might be affected by their special needs. Is your local grocery shop accessible for your wheelchair and can you easily get into a pub, pay your bill at the bar and go to the toilet? Can you easily use public transport? Do you get equal leisure time opportunities if you are visually or hearing impaired? Is your visit to a museum as fulfilling as it is to a person without your needs? Can you fully enjoy a tourist walk through the historical and cultural heritage of a town or city? Do you get easy access to activities organised by leisure time organisations, like sports clubs or theatres?

With our project we wanted to make a difference on different levels. On one hand we set up the project activities in such a way that we seriously enhanced awareness in all project’s participants and participating schools and families. But with our dissemination events and through close cooperation with our towns/cities and target group organisations we equally enhanced awareness in people we brought into contact with our project and its results in all countries. On the other hand the project tried to use its STE(A)M skills to develop technological solutions for certain hindrances. We put these skills to work in favour of a society that wants to keep everyone on board. In order to reach this goal the project required and stimulated critical thinking and creativity in students and teachers alike, linking science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. And this lead to technological “quick wins” or full scale technological solutions that try to soften daily needs experienced by wheelchair users or people who are visually impaired, hearing impaired, weakened by old age or even suffer from dementia. Apart from the above we hoped that our working method would prove to be an inspiring example of STEAM teaching didactics.

In order to reach our objectives we didn’t just try to make our participants more aware. We also tried to inspire them to act and do something about the problems they became aware of. And of course we wanted to use the STE(A)M skills within our network and put them to work in service of society, and especially the people with disabilities we aimed at. A multitude of activities was set up at all schools themselves, online cooperation was stimulated and all of this culminated in 2 Learning, Teaching and Training activities per year at which participants with and without special needs enjoyed each other’s company, but before all cooperated, evaluated and motivated each other to continue and make progress. Another LTT served to specifically train project teachers in all relevant skills necessary to carry out the activities and reach the objectives we aimed at. All project activities strived to reach these objectives and were carried out in very close cooperation with a large network of associated partners, containing care taking institutions and support groups for people with special needs but also a university and university college. The Swedish school, at the start supported by Mid Sweden University Östersund, inspired the social awareness part of the project, setting up a programme that allowed the partner schools to not only think about the project topic or discuss it, but also act. In close cooperation with our associated partners questionnaires were developed, which the participants ran in all participating countries. These questionnaires on one hand focussed on the daily needs of people with disabilities, but on the other hand also on the disability friendliness of our own towns and cities. Amongst other things teams of students and/or teachers also checked the accessibility of the public domain (town or city centre/public buildings) and literally measured the accessibility of the private domain (shops, cafés, pubs, restaurants, …). They studied the availability of leisure time opportunities for people with special needs, etc ... Results were collected and studied by all participants, and analysed by the social studies department of the Swedish partner school. Apart from reports about the state of affairs of special needs care in our towns or cities, this process also provided us with data that allowed us to agree on the most relevant parameters to determine how "disability friendly" a town or city is. Next these parameters were used by the Greek partner in order to set up a digital tool with which cities can first of all assess themselves. At the same time the tool was developed in such a way that it also gives the general public, and therefore also the special needs inhabitants or visitors, a way to assess the participating towns/cities, and after dissemination any town or city they like. Moreover it was set up as such that it can also be used as an awareness tool for e.g. schools running a project on inclusion. Also during 3 long years, a lot of energy was put into setting up a “disability friendly walk” through the cultural and historical heritage of our towns and cities. In our pre project meetings with special needs support groups we had learned that there was a real need in this field. There are many tourist walks through city centres, but few of them take into account people's special needs. Therefore both social and technological activities in our project aimed at setting up such a walk in our town/city centres, giving an opportunity to wheelchair users and visually and hearing impaired people, to better enjoy the historic and cultural heritage of our towns and cities. Students tested and discussed the walk, together with people in a wheelchair or with a blind person (and a dog). Buildings were scanned with a drone and students learned to make STL files resulting in 3D images necessary for printing. Students and teachers learned to make videos with green key sign language insets. It was the Belgo-Greek team that needed to get activities in this field started. Advised technically by the Belgian university college Howest, they shared their expertise in activities about 3D imaging, 3D printing and model making, split screen video creation, geolocation, etc... Very soon after the Teachers’ LTT the effort was carried on in all participating schools and towns and has resulted in 6 disability friendly walks called “(NAME OF CITY) for everyone”. Finally the last activities aimed at dissemination. Therefore a big multiplier event in the city of Porto served as the kick-off for this phase of the project and was later on followed by more large scale dissemination events at all towns/cities in the partnership. These did not only serve to show and demonstrate the outcomes; they aimed at inspiring other people, schools and towns/cities to set up similar initiatives. Therefore the working methods, the do’s and don’ts were registered in such a way that they are easily transferable. A last category of activities that was set up, was of course frequent evaluation moments for the project coordinators. Not only were there 4 Transnational Project Meetings; also at every Learning, Teaching and Training event room was made for an evaluation meeting of at least one coordinator of every country in order to keep the project on track.

Ultimately the project ended with more results than we had originally hoped for. First of all we dare say that we managed to reach an enhanced social awareness of some people's special needs, not only in the schools' students and teachers , but also with many other people and organisations that were involved, like e.g. our town and city councils, and through our dissemination events and the running of questionnaires also in leisure time organisations and, to the extent that we managed to get sufficient media coverage, even the general public. In the schools themselves the questionnaires were drafted, joint activities for people with and without special needs were run and from the start an important part was played by our Portuguese partner schools which joined forces to make presentations and videos clarifying to all participants the extent to which certain disabilities make life so much harder, this way raising the awareness of all other participants from the outset. With our STE(A)M approach we also realised quite a number of more specific and tangible, technological solutions to certain problems that can also further enhance awareness in the general public. And that will certainly be the case with our most eye-catching project result: the disability friendly walk. In every town/city the project activities resulted in a 1.5 to 2.5 km walk through the cultural and historical heritage of the participating towns/cities. In dialogue with the town administration and our target audience each school and its town realised a walk that is not only wheelchair accessible and for which at certain places the town infrastructure needed to be adapted. It also offers multiple 3D models that allow the visually impaired to literally “get in touch” with the cultural heritage of the town. Moreover at chosen locations a video is provided that is supported by subtitles and sign language in order to also let the hearing impaired fully enjoy the walk. The walks itself have been made available to the general public by publishing them on the Route You App which even cooperated with the Belgian coordinator to adapt certain aspects of the app in order to improve its functionality. In Belgium it is also available on the Erfgoed Vlaanderen App. This availability to anyone wishing to do the walk is why we claim it also enhances the awareness of the general public. The Belgian coordinator also put a lot of effort into trying to create a geolocation and navigation tool for the blind in order to let them do the walk more autonomously. With the help of a self-constructed satellite navigator and the wristbands of a Paris company (with which our project cooperated) the blind person gets directions through vibrations that tell him or her to go to the left, to the right or cross the street, preferably at the pedestrian crossing. Although the project didn’t commit to realizing this as a final project result, it was successfully tested in Veurne, Porto and Östersund. The system may not allow the blind person to do the walk completely on his/her own, but it allows him or her to actually take the lead when doing this walk with seeing friends or family members. A second project result is based on the parameters derived from the social studies questionnaires and the “check and measure” activities at the LTTs for students and teachers. Against this background the Greek participants developed a digital tool with which towns and cities, but also other organisations or the general public could (self)assess the disability friendliness of a town/city. For a specific shop, pub, restaurant, … the user needs to fill in a number of data concerning the width of the entrance, the presence of a ramp, the height of the counter, the presence of a disability friendly toilet, etc … A scoring system may allow the organisations or towns and cities interested to detect and define working points for the future. Although the digital tool, the navigation system and the 3D printing of buildings and works of art may seem to be the most impressive use of our technological skills, several other outputs were realised involving the use of our special skills. The technological skills also resulted in adapted (board) games for the visually or hearing impaired. Most board games are difficult to play for blind people because pieces on a board shift position when they touch them and also because colour is important to distinguish between players and pieces, etc. Again 3D printing proved to be the solution. Technology also lead to prototypes of a blind guidance stick with sensors that detect overhanging objects, so that blind people no longer bump their heads. And there is the online memory game conceived to stimulate the memory of the elderly and even people with dementia, a game that can be personalised with one’s own pictures and that can be played in various difficulty levels. Not everything worked. Students also tried to devise a sound system to let hearing impared students better enjoy music. But after a year of testing we needed to conclude that the result was unsatisfactory. However it still remained an excellent STEM teaching experience. Also artistic skills played an important part. Inspired by the Italian partner several sets of ‘sensory paintings’ were created by our students, allowing blind people to feel a painting and in the mean time hear what they are touching. The Conservatorio do Porto used its musical background to guide us through the choice of music for the videos of the inclusive walks and had dozens of teachers and students perform a high-standard musical in order to collect money for people with special needs. Their students also created a number of videos visualising mathematical theorems for hearing impaired students. The sports know-how of the Slovenian partner and its contacts with the Slovenian Paralympic committee resulted in the creation of a Paralympic Sports Container. It holds all the equipment needed to try out a number of (simplified) paralympic sports and comes with a simple manual explaining how you can play these sports with some simple adaptations to any sports hall. It aims at schools that want to use it in a special sports day and this way also serves as a dissemination and awareness tool. An unexpected outcome was the result of the efforts of the schools in Alexandroupoli, Sestri Levante and Veurne to inspire their towns to join the WHO Age Friendly City programme in which cities contractually engage to care for the needs of the elderly in all municipal decisions taken. Ljulbjana, Östersund and Porto had already become a member before our project started. Although this could not be expected at the beginning of the project, our close cooperation with our towns had the unexpected result that the three remaining towns not only considered becoming a member but are actually either in the process of applying to enter the programme or have already entered. Finally an invisible yet clear outcome of our project is a change in attitude in all participants. At the beginning of the project there was a certain fear in both participants with and without special needs. A fear to communicate with each other, a fear to more closely engage with each other. The joint activities on the Learning, Teaching and Training events have changed that completely and have not only brought awareness, but also a form of self-confidence that has allowed them to bridge the gap and cooperate as equals.