Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning

BEACONING sets a forefront in multifaceted education technologies through large-scale piloting of a digital learning platform that blend physical and digital spaces. As innovation action strategies, pilots combine opportunities for new ICTs in multiple ways that merge learning acquired in formal, non-formal and informal means, developing the skills for today’s abled and disabled learners and workforce. The BEACONING platform will be a ubiquitous solution that exploits advances in user experience design, mobile communication, location-based and context aware systems, procedural content generation, pedagogy-driven gamification, learning analytics and cloud technology though innovative integration towards a blended learning space. The BEACONING demonstrator will facilitate, assess and author gamified learning activities, integrating existing educational tools and services of the participating organisations. Focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the cross-subject approach embedded in a Problem-Based Learning model will contextualise learning within real world problem solving and applications. The role of learners is amplified in the process of filtering and connecting concepts framed under practical, investigative and exploratory scenarios. Large-scale pilots will validate and inform the development of the BEACONING ecosystem that democratises learning across and among fully abled and those with mild to moderate physical and mental impairments (age 15 to 24), undergoing general and vocational training. BEACONING anticipates the benefits of making cross-subject matter more understandable, fostering the application of subject specialism to other domains. The pilot substantiates the technical and economic viability and the impact of the innovative platform to strategise market adoption and replication. By integrating experiences in a highly engaging, contextualized and personalised manner, learning can beyond the barriers of space and time.