The BIG GAME project team is happy to announce we had a chance to meet each other at the project’s interim meeting in Tallinn. Cooperation on international projects is carried forward as a process that includes numerous steps. The implementation of the project is always teamwork, both together with the international consortium and separately within the partner organizations, based on the division of work defined in the project plan. An important part of teamwork are of course the transnational project meetings, which are held both virtual and face-to-face.
Although traveling has been and still is a natural part of international project cooperation, the pandemic has since brought the established online and hybrid models of international cooperation with virtual functions and meetings to use alongside or even instead of the traditional face-to-face project meetings. The essential thing is not where we meet, but how well the project progresses and trust is built between the project partners. At its best, international cooperation is the exchange of expertise as well as cultural dialogue that enriches all parties involved.The peak moments of the projects include the understanding that through joint development work, the consortium can together be more than the sum of its parts.
As the BIG GAME project was born during the pandemic, normal project cooperation began with signs of uncertainty, because we had no idea when we would be able to meet each other face to face as a team. However, the cooperation started quite naturally with a virtual Kick-Off, because several team members already knew each other. In any case, the BIG GAME project serves as an example of long-term international project cooperation, as the cooperation was initiated by the previous common project Erasmus+ G.A.STEM (Enhancing STEM Education through Arts and Mini-Games), which ended in 2021. The BIG GAME project's personnel is a combination of European colleagues from Finland, Italy, Estonia and Romania, several of whom have already worked with each other in different consortia.
After the virtual start and half a year of working online, it was great to get to the transnational meeting, which was held in Tallinn, Estonia. The Interim meeting was dedicated to discussion of the results achieved in IO1 and to defining the learning model based on the digital Storytelling approach to be used in the BIG GAME, as well as to preparation of the instructional design for the STEM learning scenarios to be delivered to the project’s target groups (teachers and students).
At the interim meeting, along with the WP leaders' introduction and presentations, we continued our common work around the project content from where we had already gotten so far virtually. We worked by using collaborative storytelling exercises as a tool for visualizing how to build a story based on environmental game scenarios given. After working, we went through the stories and solutions produced by different work pairs. We also discussed and planned how the produced learning scenarios should be evaluated, and what evaluation criteria would be relevant to use in the context of our project. From here it was again a clear path forward to face the next project milestones – so warm thanks to our hosts from TLU!
