PROGRAM ACRONYM: ARCHISTEAM
PROJECT FULL NAME: Greening the Skills of Architecture Students via STEAM Education
PROJECT NUMBER: 2016-1-TR01-KA203-034962
It is already consented that the advents of ICT and the rapid developments of technologies have a strong impact on the life cycle of professions. Skills and knowledge obtained in a conventional education and practices are expiring very quickly unless these technologies are employed efficiently by the individuals. This paradigmatic change requires new skills and mindsets which may not be possible to be developed through conventional education. Hence, restructuring and evolving the education are today’s major musts. In this transformation, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Maths) as a whole redefines its role enabling learners to develop self-learning, problem solving skills which are basic requirements of a sustainable society, economy and thus sustainable life quality of individuals. The essential skills in achieving sustainability are defined as digital skills and green skills. Many countries targeting green economies and sustainable societies accept them as necessary competences that should be provided by the education. It is also important to point out that these competencies although may exhibit small variations regarding the professions, a common ground should be achieved for all. Thus, they are transversal competences and required for lifelong learning.
ARCHISTEAM aims to develop a core curriculum for architecture education in higher education level to establish green and digital skills by means of integrating STEAM approach to the existing curricula in the course of self-sufficient, sustainable skills for adaptation to emerging technologies for lifelong learning.
Hence, the most relevant priority is selected as “open and innovative education, training and youth work, embedded in digital era” as the proposed project will be an open and innovative education and it will provide resources for educators and learners at higher education level. In addition, project will contribute to the digitalisation of quality learning content and will promote the use of ICT in the course of self-adaptation of green and digital skills.
Further to the initial most relevant priority, project coincide with the objectives of high-level basic and transversal competences in a lifelong learning perspective by enabling students to gain overall understanding of STEAM skills and interrelations between them to grasp new technologies and skills easily. It should be noted that knowledge gained in high education is up to date compared with K-12 education and learners are ready to reflect back their knowledge directly to practice. ARCHISTEAM aims to furnish architecture students not only with the generic STEAM skills and general perception of digital and green skills but also to construct this perception with the content developed in relation with the occupation to enable learners to sustain this perception throughout their professional life.
In this context, another related priority can be defined as “supporting the implementation of 2013 Communication on Opening Up Education”, as ARCHISTEAM will be a new medium to provide a new mode of further delivery, exploiting, responding and adapting to new technologies in learning and teaching by high-quality using ICT technologies with all the potentials in learning, teaching and digital content as proposed in the intellectual outputs of the project.