Training and learning design
Experience comes before the digital
A STEAM activity can begin from a question, a story, something to build or a problem that has no obvious answer yet. What happens before the tool is used gives the programme its direction, because age, timing, spaces, materials and the character of a group can deeply change the form the same idea ends up taking.
Technology takes on meaning inside this process. A robot can make a sequence of instructions visible, 3D modelling can lead a group to reason about shapes and proportions, a virtual environment can make it possible to observe or rebuild something that would be hard to explore in the same way in a classroom. In other cases a sheet of paper, a grid on the floor or a set of materials to handle is enough; it is not the presence of a digital tool that defines the experience, but the way it is connected to what people are trying to understand, build or solve.
This is the thinking my work has developed from since 2018, across workshops with children and teenagers, teacher training and design with schools and organisations. Over time it has amounted to around 2,000 documented hours of training, workshops and teaching, across very different settings but with constant attention to the relationship between hands-on experience, design and digital tools.
From the action to the tool
With younger children a first experience of coding can take shape on a large grid built on the floor, where the route is walked with the body before being represented through arrows and sequences. Only afterwards are those same instructions handed to a robot, which brings out very concretely the difference between what the group expected and what the machine carries out.
With older students the starting point can be completely different. A historical artefact can be observed, drawn and rebuilt from simple materials before becoming a three-dimensional model, while a mission about the Solar System can bring research, building, electronics and programming together around something that has to be designed and tested.
There is no identical sequence to apply to every programme. The problem, the group and the tools worth introducing all change, while what stays important is that whatever happens on a screen or through a device keeps a recognisable relationship with what came before it and what will come after.
A few programmes
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Polly the robot bee
With Polly coding starts from movement. Children build a route, try walking it, turn the actions into a sequence of symbols and only then programme the Blue-Bot to check whether the instructions they built together really work.
Polly the robot bee -
Solar System Mission
Space exploration becomes the context for facing scientific and design problems through building, coding, electronics, tinkering and 3D modelling. The tools enter the mission gradually while students develop, test and change their own solutions.
Solar System Mission -
Detectives of the past
The programme starts from research into an object or a technology of the past, moves through drawing and the building of a physical model and arrives at its three-dimensional reconstruction and, where the project calls for it, at exploration through augmented or virtual reality.
Detectives of the past
From the context to the experience
Every activity comes out of a series of decisions that do not always follow the same order. There are programmes where the story arrives straight away and others where it emerges as the group starts working, activities that need a long building phase and others where a few materials are enough to bring the problem out. What counts is keeping a continuity between what people are asked to do and the tools that are introduced, avoiding technology added only because it happens to be available.
During a workshop there can be a moment of moving through space, one of drawing or building and another where a robot, a 3D environment or a headset comes in. These are not steps designed to show as many technologies as possible, but different ways of looking at the same problem and making some of its aspects visible. Mistakes belong to this process too, because a solution that does not work can become the moment to stop, compare what was expected with what happened and work out what to change.
The context comes first. The technology second.
The same principle, with different people
A workshop with an early years class, a programme with secondary students and training aimed at teachers can share some underlying ideas, but they cannot be built in the same way. The language, the pace, the level of autonomy, the kind of task and even the role technology can play all change.
In teacher training what matters is not only trying an activity out but understanding its structure, discussing the choices behind it and working out how it can be changed before taking it into the classroom. With children and teenagers the programme takes shape mostly through what is made, built, discussed and revised along the way, while in design work with schools and organisations it can begin even earlier, bringing together goals, audiences, available hours, spaces and resources before the form of the programme is settled.
A path built over time
Since 2018 this work has developed across schools, teacher training, funded programmes, university teaching and learning design. Alongside workshops with children and teenagers came courses for teachers, work on inclusion and learning environments, programmes on 3D modelling and immersive environments, and teaching and assessment at university level.
In total around 2,000 hours of training, workshops and teaching are documented. These include 190 hours within the specialisation course for support teaching at Università Europea di Roma, delivered through Talent S.r.l., as well as a substantial part of the work carried out inside PNRR programmes in schools.
- around 2,000 documented hours
- working since 2018
- 190 hours at university level
- at least 700 hours in PNRR programmes
SoleStorie also grew out of some of these workshops
One question kept coming back while looking at what is left after an activity. What happens to the posters, the models, the drawings and the objects a group builds once the workshop is over?
SoleStorie comes partly out of that thought and tries to give those artefacts continuity by linking them to digital content through NFC tags, without moving the centre of the experience from the object to the screen. What has been built stays the starting point, while the digital makes it possible to add a story, an explanation, a piece of audio or another layer of the experience.
I am a co-founder of the project and I handle product design and software development.
Behind the activities
Constructionism, project-based learning, tinkering, cooperative learning, storytelling, game-based learning and Universal Design for Learning are some of the references that enter a programme when they help read what is happening in the group. The same goes for coding, educational robotics, 3D modelling and printing, electronics, augmented and virtual reality or artificial intelligence, which are not necessarily used together and do not play the same part in every experience.
Methods and technologies become interesting when they make it possible to build something that would otherwise be harder to observe, represent, discuss or test. That is why they are better kept attached to the activities and the problems they helped face, rather than presented as a repertoire separate from the rest of the work.
Experience and collaborations
Over time the classroom work has been joined by training, design and a few assessment and outreach roles. Among the most recent are talks at Didacta Italia and FermHAmente, membership of the technical group of the City of Perugia for the assessment of STEAM projects for schools, and the roles of Accelium representative for the Marche region and Makby representative for Italy.
About me and professional pathIf you are picturing a programme
A new activity can start from a project that is already defined, from a class and a number of available hours, or simply from a theme somebody would like to approach differently. From there we can think about the shape of the programme, about what people will actually do and about which tools are worth bringing in.
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