SCRAPPIES
Table of contents
Project description
Transformations in the modern world, changes in culture and on the labour market are forcing new teaching methods at school. Increasingly, teachers express helplessness in dealing with pupils who appear to them as "difficult", hyperactive and uncooperative. Students in turn claim that school is boring and distant from real life. Teachers criticise the anachronistic, ossified system based on passivity of the subject, not encouraging creativity. Analyses of the results of external examinations confirm this. Students may not be interested because the learning experience is too abstract and vague, so they find it difficult to understand, grasp or create a mental picture of it.
The Scrappies project is an Erasmus+ funded project. The project's main goal is to assist schools to develop an effective environment where creativity and divergent thinking (directed towards different possible ways of solving a problem) have the opportunity to flourish and teaching becomes highly effective. By empowering teachers and schools to provide opportunities for using non-standard aids such as scrap materials (e.g. bottles, aluminum foil, caps, cardboard boxes and many more) we want to create an environment that helps students visualise lessons and transfer abstract concepts into concrete, easier to remember objects which allow students to learn more and retain better what they have learned.
By changing the perspective of children and adults and their perception of everyday (often disposable) objects, we reinforce their thinking about sustainable development and build pro-environmental attitudes. By involving parents and other stakeholders in the project the school strengthens its connections, the commitment of the community towards the school, as well as increase the level of civic engagement.
Project objectives
- To increase sustainable thinking and up-cycling in introducing reusable things (scrap materials);
- To enhance the creativity, divergent thinking, cooperation, and resilience among pupils;
- To reduce boredom in the classroom, and to make the teaching learning process more systematic, exciting and lively;
- To extend students’ imagination and experience far beyond the classroom;
- To help students visualise lessons and transfer abstract concepts into concrete, easier to remember objects;
- To assist schools to introduce the concept of using scrap materials in schools to the parents and to the community, including help to collect scrap materials.
- Increase the level of commitment to green earth and climate action.
