Shape2Gether

The project aims to implement innovative approaches in the education for sustainable development in the context of climate change and its impacts on Europe by bringing together three groups of partner specialisations, i.e. geosciences, new technologies, and serious game design. The project also aims to shape a new curriculum in education for sustainable development, taking into account geosciences education, new technologies and gaming elements. This should lead to an application for the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters programme. The project will investigate how these approaches can be used to enhance students' learning and engagement in topics related to climate change and sustainable development, ultimately leading to greater awareness, action, and impact. The main (and most-of-all) motivation of the project is to develop a systematic educational framework assessing the current climate change situation by applying novel and state-of-the-art approaches leading to awareness-raising about environmental and climate change challenges.

The project "Shape2Gether" builds on the previous three successful projects ( Spationomy 2.0 ,  EduChange 2.0 , and  DigiGeo ) and the main objectives of the "Shape2Gether" project are:

1. to contextualize geosciences (geoinformatics, geography, and development studies), new technologies (mobile-based and online tools, immersive virtual reality, and educational e-tools), and serious games (discursive game design and prototyping educational activities) with the climate change challenges
2. by doing so, we strive to shape innovations into education for sustainable development tackling local-based environmental problems
3. in order to equip all participants (students and staff) with competencies to make them real actors or agents of change
4. to help raise the awareness and importance of local-based actions (active citizenship) in the fight against climate change.
5. as a "concluding" objective - we plan to develop brand new and yet non-existing curricula encapsulating the abovementioned objectives into a pan-European study programme under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters scheme to maintain our learning/teaching framework in a longer-term run.

In order to achieve these objective, the project activities are divided into five work packages

• WP1 (Project management)
• WP2 (Research & methodologies) - topical learning&teaching materials, methodologies, and research agenda
• WP3 (Summer schools & staff training) - organization of intensive summer schools for students & training events for staff
• WP4 (Curriculum development) - unique joint pan-European curriculum development
• WP5 (Dissemination & awareness raising) - communication campaign of project achievements, dissemination and awareness-raising events.

The project is designed to carry out activities in the three-years lifespan with short-term physical mobilities of staff (training events) and blended mobility of students (summer schools). Staff meetings' main focus is on the interdisciplinary joint training to encourage (re)development of crucial knowledge and skills of staff members in contextualizing geosciences, new technologies, and serious games with climate change via education for sustainable development (ESD). Summer schools feature the core part of the project - the intensive 5-days learning/teaching events are key encounters between educators and learners to share and deepen their experiences and skills in geosciences, work in international and interdisciplinary teams, absorb new knowledge/skills from staff lectures and workshops, adopt cutting-edge technological skills, implement serious games principles in education for sustainable development, and finally ground their own perspectives on climate change to become "actors of change".

Besides, the Shape2Gether team will rethink, redesign, develop and create topical learning and teaching materials, methodologies, and frame a curricula design for a potential Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters. Scientific contributions (research papersú are a inevitable part of the project too.

We are around 20 academics/professionals from seven European universities and one educational enterprise: - Palacký University Olomouc (Czechia) - UPOL - Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) - RUB - Universiteit Utrecht (Netherland) - UU - Universita ta Malta (Malta) - UM - University of Turku (Finland) - UTU - Technische Universität Wien (Austria) - TUW - Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) - NTNU - Lentävä Liitutaulu (Finland) - Seppo