Erasmus+ KA2 Small-scale partnership

Buinho Creative Hub from Portugal and Maltepe Fen Lisesi from Turkey

The eWaste Learning Paths project aimed to increase awareness about the problem of electronic waste at schools and connect it to the makerspace approach in education. There is a lack of curriculum integration of relevant STEAM contents related to e-Waste and circular economy that prevents these topics to be addressed in classrooms. For this reason, we provided opportunities for quality education in sustainable design and fabrication, especially to schools working with more disadvantaged communities.
During the project we achieved different objectives: 1. create local workshops and learning dynamics together with an extended group of local schools that focused on disadvantaged students and teachers. 2. empower school communities by acting on the capacitation of teachers and incentivizing the creation of schools' makerspaces. 3. create an e-learning course about e-waste with the purpose of providing free access to creative and relevant circular economy practices that could be applied in the classroom. The outcomes of this process were the following:
1. A repository of e-waste practical activities and an e-learning course composed of video tutorials, guidelines, and quizzes, available for school use.
2. Pedagogical frameworks and guidelines to ensure a clearer understanding to the teachers of how to implement such an approach in their daily practice and curriculum.
3. An open source policy to enable the democratisation of access to high-quality education in relevant topics for disadvantaged school communities.

In Barcelona we collaborated with Escola Bogatell, Escola La Mar Bella, and Institut Quatre Cantons and the activities that took place are described below:

Educational Activities for teachers in Primary schools
We held several online and presential sessions where the teachers received training on the following topics: a) circular economy, b) creative reuse and joinery, c) how to hold activities with creative reuse in a makerspace, d) How to set-up a makerspace within the school and e)how to use tools.

Educational activities for the students in the primary schools
Sessions organised as part of the regular school classes where the students were engaged in hands-on activities based on creative reuse of e-waste. The activities took place in the newly established makerspaces in the schools Mar Bella and Bogatel, and were used as a life example for the teachers to see in practice what they learned about in the sessions dedicated for the teachers.

Educational activity with Quatre Cantons highschool
This was an activity planned as part of the school curriculum, where the students dedicate 6 weeks to work on a specific project. In this case the task was to design and create en object out of electric and electronic waste. TransfoLAB BCN offered a guided visit of our premises, lectures on upcycling and joinery, and we monitored the progress of the proposed ideas. The most successful projects were chosen to take part in our event, ReFab Electronics.

ReFab Electronics Event
During the two days of the event, six teams from educational and research centres participated to respond to the problem of E-waste, designing and building installations and objects from obsolete electrical and electronic devices. In the end, all the creations were demonstrated to more than 200 visitors who had the opportunity not only to see but also to experiment and play with the implemented objects.

The development of the project can be followed on Instagram @e_wastelearningpaths.

The project is supported by: