EXpanding Content And Language Integrated learning through BUilding a sustainable future in Realtime in immersive environments

Our team member, teacher (Clasu) and researcher Laura Pihkala-Posti had already been working with almost 10 years with the 3D game world Minecraft with interesting and promising results. We wished to continue and expand the design based development work initiated by her and supported by the Company TeacherGaming. We especially wanted to expand the work from language and intercultural learning even to STEM subjects because cross-curricular approaches are focused in our schools and universities, what even the language teaching needs to take into consideration. The national and local curricula wish new combinations and cross-disciplinary approaches and focus on intercultural communication skills and sustainability, as well as cooperation with universities. All these aspects were possible to be strengthened through a participation in this kind of an EU project. Development demands time and resources, and external additional funding was needed to be able to manage this kind of big changes. An EU project opened precisely those possibilities that we had wished. The goal was to create new ways of cooperation with schools, universities and other institutions in Europe with new learning spaces and CLIL experience.

The aim was to develop new kinds of immersive game-based approaches for CLIL and CLIL LOTE learning in STEM context using originally informal game environments in international project- based learning cooperation in the formal context. We aimed at enabling participation and engagement through virtual cooperation and collaboration in 3D sandbox game worlds, in order to fight against climate change and for our planet, and at the same time learning critical information retrieval and thinking, creative problem solving, intercultural cooperation and communication in international and / or multilingual project and phenomenon-based settings. In addition we aimed at preparing support materials based on our project experiences for interested teachers in whole Europe and creating a cooperation network for exchange and further development.

We implemented first a need analysis, prepared based on it and the theoretical background the phases of the field work of CLIL and CLIL LOTE learning in STEM context using 3Dgame environments in international learning cooperation projects. The developed and realized virtual approaches offered an unique possibility for European schools to use CLIL and CLIL LOTE learning on a larger scale, than normally possible. Learners cooperated interculturally using foreign languages in order to create 3D-environments in real time, by building joint sustainability projects in the game worlds, this means, principles of sustainable way of life were in focus but also by communicating via audio and text messages, as well as video communication. Based on our experiences, we built materials to support this kind of approaches, and improved them step by step through the different field work cases, that we organized with schools in 6 European countries. Finally, we created an online education package for the interested teachers, gave online lectures, recorded them and shared together with the support materials, that help other teachers to work the approaches developed by us, and to get support through the network created during the project.

The project trained the intercultural communication and cooperation skills of the students and increased the knowledge of important sustainability themes, such as energy, building, transportation and food solutions. A move towards real cross-disciplinary learning (CLIL/ CLIL LOTE) definitely happened. Students (and teachers) got used to different kinds of digital applications (3D game worlds, collaborative writing documents, video conference and voice chat platforms). Teachers from different subjects were involved. Learner participation showed as it's best a quite high level of autonomy, agency and creativity. Different possible realizations of the immersive 3D project approaches were created. In order to fit the time schedules of the schools in the different countries, which also showed to be one of the biggest project challenges, different settings were developed and applied. The cooperation cases were scaled from smaller ones of just some mutual meetings, to one week or month, even up to projects lasting up to 8 months. The lightest version was an informal project summer club where the approach was used by the most interested pupils, as a new form of successful differentiation to achieve personalized learning.