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The present paper reports on the pre‐piloting of the StartUp_EU Lifelong Learning European Project. StartUp_EU is a project for secondary schools that simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up a new company. The project developed a series of mini‐games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for secondary school students, between 14 and 18 years of age, to inspire high tech entrepreneurship. The platform was based on the open source ILIAS Learning Content Management (LCM) platform and the mini‐games were developed in 3D Flash. Each mini‐game focused on a specific challenge/task associated with business start‐up. Students participated in a competition completing a series of 8 tasks simulating the process of arriving at an idea for a business to a real product and creating an elevator pitch. Students had to fill in a pre‐competition questionnaire at the beginning and a post‐competition questionnaire at the end of the competition. The questionnaires were completed online and the pre‐piloting lasted eight weeks, from the middle of January 2013 until the middle of March 2013. Forty seven (47) students took part in the prepiloting with the vast majority of them never taken part in a competition about entrepreneurship and had limited or no experience with game‐based learning. This paper presents the results of the pre and post questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of social media is impacting on the lives of people with learning disabilities; it is important that this impact be a positive and fulfilling experience. Young people find themselves in a range of dangerous situations online without the support or understanding to keep themselves safe. Practitioners and parents increasingly face problems of this nature themselves and require support to allow them to make informed choices that help keep young people healthy and safe online. While there are examples of resources that promote online safety for people with learning disabilities, young people, carers and practitioners in one area of Scotland have indicated the necessity to have a centralised and interactive resource to encourage people to develop online safety skills and understand how to stay healthy and safe online. These are primarily physical resources such as worksheets, slides and booklets with limited interactive content. In this paper we discuss an alternative approach that uses an immersive games-based learning tool to train and influence the behaviour of young people with learning disabilities. The online safety tool has potential to help community, acute health/social workers or guardians educate and monitor the online vulnerability and safety of a young person with a learning disability. Young people can simulate real life scenarios and learn through problem solving or reflective practice in a format that they can interact with and relate to on a daily basis. Social care professionals or trainers can update elements of the scenarios and content and can remotely facilitate, track progress and monitor behaviour and performance. Requirements and initial concepts were gathered through Experience Labs using a Participatory Design approach and this paper presents the proof of concept game that has been developed and the results from a preliminary investigation of the use of the games with young people with learning disabilities. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the game may impact policy and practice in this area and how the game can be further developed and evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of health and social services is increasing as European society grows older and unemployment and relocation across Europe increases. This growing demand for services is creating unprecedented pressures on health and social care systems. Despite differences in political approaches and institutional frameworks, health and social services across Europe face similar challenges in adjusting to demographic ageing, societal change, rising expectations and consumerism, changing employment and family patterns, evolving technological opportunities and funding issues. A key part of the sector deals with vulnerable people. Education and training plays a pivotal role in developing those who work with vulnerable people and, more generally, the social services sector. In many parts of Europe, the sector has a strong emphasis on learning and assessing skills for job roles in real practice environments (“practice learning”). In some qualifications, practice learning can be almost 40% of the total learning time. There are also on-going demands for practice learning with new qualified professionals and professionals as part of CPD. There are clear logistical challenges in arranging practice opportunities where trainees are able to learn the core skills of the job and receive high quality support, supervision and assessment of their practice from suitably qualified mentors/practice assessors. Furthermore, finding sufficient numbers of such placements has been a challenge for the last 30 years. However, there are also other challenges; e.g. risks associated with work-based learning and the safety and well-being of service users in giving trainees access to their lives. This paper discusses the development of a 3D simulated practice learning environment that focuses on supporting people who work with young children. The paper then presents the findings from a large-scale teacher training programme for the game that was run across various European countries with 120 participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reports on the pre‐piloting of the StartUp_EU Lifelong Learning European Project.  StartUp_EU  is a project for secondary schools that simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up a new company.  The project developed a series of mini‐games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for  secondary school students, between 14 and 18 years of age, to inspire high tech entrepreneurship. The platform was based  on the open source ILIAS Learning Content Management (LCM) platform and the mini‐games were developed in 3D Flash.  Each  mini‐game  focused  on  a  specific  challenge/task  associated  with  business  start‐up.  Students  participated  in  a  competition completing a series of 8 tasks simulating the process of arriving at an idea for a business to a real product and  creating an elevator pitch. Students had to fill in a pre‐competition questionnaire at the beginning and a post‐competition  questionnaire at the end of the competition. The questionnaires were completed online and the pre‐piloting lasted eight  weeks, from the middle of January 2013 until the middle of March 2013. Forty seven (47) students took part in the prepiloting with the vast majority of them never taken part in a competition about entrepreneurship and had limited or no  experience with game‐based learning. This paper presents the results of the pre and post questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reports on the pre-piloting of the StartUp-EU Lifelong Learning European Project. StartUp-EU is a project for secondary schools that simulating the excitement and creative innovation of starting up a new company. The project developed a series of mini-games, an encompassing Web2.0 platform and a collaborative competition for secondary school students, between 14 and 18 years of age, to inspire high tech entrepreneurship. The platform was based on the open source ILIAS Learning Content Management (LCM) platform and the mini-games were developed in 3D Flash. Each mini-game focused on a specific challenge/task associated with business start-up. Students participated in a competition completing a series of 8 tasks simulating the process of arriving at an idea for a business to a real product and creating an elevator pitch. Students had to fill in a pre-competition questionnaire at the beginning and a post-competition questionnaire at the end of the competition. The questionnaires were completed online and the pre-piloting lasted eight weeks, from the middle of January 2013 until the middle of March 2013. Forty seven (47) students took part in the pre-piloting with the vast majority of them never taken part in a competition about entrepreneurship and had limited or no experience with game-based learning. This paper presents the results of the pre and post questionnaires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]