The Stories of Tomorrow project is specifically designed for teaching professionals in the disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). It introduces teachers to the concept of digital storytelling, as well as inquiry-based science teaching techniques, in order to develop, improve and enhance their teaching skills and practices. The project’s partners designed and tested a new vision for teaching, which leads to the development of strategies for how teachers’ roles and conditions can support and enable deeper learning for students.
To this end, the STORIES Consortium has identified three major exploitation paths:
(i) Commercial Exploitation of:
a. The STORIES Collaboration Platform
b. The STORIES Authoring Tool and
c. The STORIES Conversational Agent
(ii) Exploitation in education context:
a. The STORIES Conversational Agent can be further customized as an embedded tool to the educational process (and gradually to the curriculum). A tool which evaluates student performance on collaborative solving skills while being executing unnoticeably in the background. Regardless of the integration of this assessment to the official grading system, the collected data will be valuable teachers, headteachers and policy makers in order to examine specific curriculum interventions.
b. The Teachers Professional Development Programme that has been tested in two international courses in 2017 and in 2018 and was implemented also in 2019 due to high demand expressed by teachers
c. The Educational Scenarios & Content Creation for VR&AR developers in the form of – in-app purchases are always a major business model for AR/VR developers. The biggest attraction for the potential customers of STORIES is that the STORIES app can be published for free, with all features, but some limitations such as available educational scenarios and content. In-app purchases will still be the big role in AR/VR industry as they already do in the mobile and web markets.
(iii) Exploitation in academic context
Data and knowledge gained within the STORIES project will inspire future research proposals. STORIES evaluation instruments and results will contribute to scientific research on effective and fruitful STE(A)M education. STORIES Research results can be published in journals and presented at science education conferences to reach a wide audience within the field of science education (stakeholders, researchers, educators, policy makers). Besides use of the scientific findings, the main exploitable results are the developed assessment instruments for fascination for science and science knowledge. The collaboration test with conversational agents provides a basis for further research in this field. The science knowledge scale can be used to assess the first intellectual abilities of the deeper learning paradigm in STEM, Science Understanding and Knowledge and Scientific Reasoning. It is based on items of TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) choosing items relating to the content of STORIES in the fields of earth science, physical science and life science. The fascination for science scale reflects the motivational deeper learning abilities Interest and Excitement together with Identification with Scientific Enterprise.
Finally, the practical experience gained by the educational researchers, teachers and students gained during the two implementation phases should not be overlooked. Many innovative technology projects have failed due to poor planning, implementation or lack of training and support. Virtual Reality is no different, and careful planning, understanding and implementation are required to ensure students ultimately benefit from the investment in the technology. Thanks to experience gained during the project, STORIES partners we are able to find the right equipment, install and manage this equipment, integrate it into our lessons within the curriculum, provide the required training so teachers can use it effectively and, most important, measure the success and outcomes of using it.
