Play4Guidance - A European Business Game to train and guide students and young unemployed on entrepreneurial, transversal and mathematical skills

Play4Guidance has been funded within the framework of the European Union Erasmus+ programme

Newsletter #10

Play4Guidance International Contest

Page 1

Cultivating entrepreneurial mindsets in young people

Page 2

Innovation in Education: which needs from Digital Innovation?

Page 3

Play4Guidance Project 2nd National Conference,Turkey

Page 3

The Heart of Transformation

Page 4

Play4Guidance Project 2nd National Conference, Greece

Page 4

Contents

facebook.com/play4guidance Play4Guidance Group @Play4Guidance info@play4guidance.eu

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Play4Guidance

International Contest

Play4guidance promotes the first edition of an international competition, the Europe‟s Next Top Entrepreneur event based in Italy, Ireland, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Germany. Measure yourself within the P4G business game and become the champion at national or, who knows, international level! For more information visit: http://play4guidance.eu/europes-next-entrepreneur/

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Cultivating entrepreneurial mindsets in young

people Equipping students with an entrepreneurial mindset will enable them to become more engaged and take ownership of their own success. Polzin (2015) highlights perseverance and determination as the key qualities of an entrepreneurial mindset, which students need to succeed in an ever changing world. Varied reports, for example the United States Department of Labor (1999), suggest that many students in primary and post-primary education will have jobs that haven‟t yet been invented. Therefore, in order to prepare students for survival in a more complex world it is necessary to promote opportunities for them to become more self aware, solve problems, take risks, and become more resilient to change and failure.

In order to cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets in young people we need to create safe learning environments in which they are comfortable making mistakes and feel that they are supported and encouraged throughout the learning process (Crotty, 2014). Associating mistakes with growth rather than failure is fundamental for developing a growth mindset (Dweck, 2012) and encourages students to embrace challenges and build resilience. Building resilience is a crucial quality for success in school and life. Resilience may be interpreted as “any behavioral, attributional, or emotional response to an academic or social challenge that is positive and beneficial for development…” (Yeager & Dweck 2012).

This remains a challenge for educators, as the emphasis on standardised tests, results, measuring and monitoring means that students “learn test-taking skills rather than content and higher order cognitive skills” (Smyth & Banks 2012). What this also means is that students are encouraged not to make mistakes, as mistakes will lower their grades which in turn can be associated with poor performance. But, in the workplace mistakes are made and progress depends on an individual‟s ability to adapt, to learn, to relearn, and to create value. Therefore it is crucial that learning environments are created which result in students discovering their creativity and developing valuable attributes and skills which allow them to reach their full potential.

Cooney (2013) asserts that the key task for educators now is to engender entrepreneurial behaviour in students by developing courses that promote meaningful, practice-based tasks whereby students test and apply their entrepreneurial skill-sets outside the classroom by buying and selling on eBay, organising charity events, and running market stalls, to name but a few examples. This closely aligns with Zhao‟s (2012, p. 9) statement that „Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about the desire to solve problems creatively.‟ Crotty‟s (2014) Educational Entrepreneurial Approach (EEA) to action research guides practitioner-researchers to turn ideas into action, show initiative and take risks in order to produce innovative, multi-media content to improve their workplace settings. The focus is on identifying a specific need in an organisation, and using one‟s

„entrepreneurial spirit‟ to make one‟s own unique contribution to the creation of knowledge by developing greater self-awareness, participating in decision-making processes in collaboration with others, and designing pedagogical and technological innovations that have the potential to transform their life and the lives of others.

At the heart of entrepreneurial endeavours is the need to generate value for society and its citizens. Value creation is a fundamental building block of any organisation; identifying opportunities and innovative ideas need to be encouraged in order to create value and, for organisations to contribute and compete in the marketplace. In the current era of disruption, students need to be equipped now more than ever with the skills, attitudes, mindset and behaviours to make themselves and their organisations more valuable and more resilient to the fast technological changes that are disrupting the way things are done.

International Centre for Innovation and Workplace Learning, ICIWL at DCU

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Innovation in Education: which needs from Digital

Innovation?

Nowadays education systems at all levels are facing the radical change of a set of learning needs resulting from the interaction between the technological and social evolution. In this newsletter, we take into account two of these needs, linked to phenomena to which a growing attention is being paid also by non-experts: the “digital divide” and the "fourth industrial revolution". A first need derives from the unbalanced distribution of digital technologies in different geographic areas or social sectors. This phenomenon, known as digital divide, traditionally focuses on the lack of knowledge of the functions of digital tools, or merely on the unavailability of such tools. However, this purely technological divide is decreasing is in decline in many European countries as a result of government initiatives and the economic interests of key players in the business of digital infrastructures. Less obvious is the theme of the competence gap for the proper use of digital technologies. In the linguistic context, it is common to distinguish between “illiteracy” and “functional illiteracy”. A contraposition that we can paraphrase to our context: if the mere knowledge of the instruments solves the technologic divide (basic digital illiteracy), it does not reduce the divide in digital skills, which we can consider a form of digital functional illiteracy. The related education needs therefore move to a higher level of sophistication and require new approaches and methods to be fulfilled. A second education need concerns cross-competences. This need is not new, but so far cross-competence skills have been seen as a nice to have, in addition to specialized skills (the subject of the traditional education systems), or are considered suited to some highly complex environments: people who develop and maintain such skills are often defined as T-shaped professionals (where the shape of the letter “T” results from the composition of specialized, vertical, skills, and cross-competence, horizontal skills). Even in this latter case, however, the recent macroeconomic reports on employment, and in particular the ones focused on the effects of digital innovation on work, show a rapidly evolving landscape. T-shaped professional are not simply desirable in a company, and in society in general. On the contrary, they are increasingly broadly needed, and their skills (such as

system thinking, entrepreneurial acumen, the ability to efficiently search information, teamwork, leadership, which are at the heart of the Play 4 Guidance project) are always necessary, regardless of the type of work. The transformation of organizations consequent to the development and widespread adoption of digital technologies, often referred to as the 4th Industrial Revolution, Digital Transformation or Innovation, is in fact bringing about the replacement of men with computers in numerous activities, and not merely just the operational ones (As has happened over time due to the automation of production processes). The World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2016 estimated that by 2020, 5 million managerial jobs will be lost due to the spread of digital technologies. Similar results emerge from a White House report of December 2016 on "Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Economics." To cope with this scenario, the WEF indicates a list of skills that qualify man in relation to the "intelligent machines" capabilities. As shown in the figure, this is just "transversal" skills, which as such will hardly be replicated by computers, at least not in the short term, and therefore education, in its widest meaning, must concentrate on selecting and developing them. The Play 4 Guidance project represent an answer to both the types of needs, aiming at enabling participants to develop cross-competence, “human” skills, while soliciting the use of computers as a tool to solve complex problems and not just as a set of automatic functions.

Article by Aurelio Ravarini, Castellanza, LIUC

Tekkeköy District National Education Directorate will host Assist.Do.Dr.İsmail İşeri , keynote speaker ,from Ondokuz Mayıs University Faculty of Engineering, who is Computer Engineering Instructor . The 2nd National Conference of Play4Guidance Erasmus + Project will focus on: - Sharing the results from P4G "Business Game" Pilot Applications - Game programming and gamification applications Presentation content: Game programming techniques and presentations will be presented and discussed in the context of gamification and learning by games, one of today's new business models.The conference will be held in Tekkeköy District Office Meeting Room on May 23, 2017 at 13:30.

Play4Guidance Project 2nd National Conference,Turkey

The Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Educational Technology Lab) and Science View, in the framework of the European Play4Guidance program, are organizing a workshop which is related to the “Educational Game of Entrepreneurship”. In the current workshop, which will take place on 26th of May, the Greek project partners will present the main aim of the project as well as the results so far. Participants will also have the opportunity to test the game of entrepreneurship by trying to develop their own virtual business! One of the biggest challenges Europe is facing today is to try to upgrade and widen people's skills in order to create and fill jobs for the future. The challenge in education is to find new ways to attract people to learn. Play4Guidance (P4G) is a European Union-funded project featuring an innovative Entrepreneurship Game aiming to educate and guide students of all levels and young unemployed people to acquire business, financial and mathematical skills.

Play4Guidance Project 2nd National Conference, Greece

The International Centre for Innovation and Workplace Learning (ICIWL) at Dublin City University (DCU) is planning its final one-day national conference on Monday 29th May. The conference entitled „The Heart of Transformation’ will explore the characteristics of an entrepreneurial mindset, critical reflection and the creative design and application of technology across a wide range of education and industry settings. The conference will present the results from the P4G pilot activities and the main results and outputs of the project: Literature Review, Business Game platform, the Matrix, and Video Tutorials. A high profile entrepreneur - Susan Hayes Culleton - will deliver the keynote presentation: „Entrepreneurial Thinking! Dismantling the myth; it‟s a man‟s world!‟

The Heart of Transformation

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Don’t forget to visit the updated P4G website, where you can experience the P4G Business Game , communicate and exchange experiences and best practices with P4G players from all around the world! gain access to rich educational material ,find detailed guidelines and step-by-step book-lets on how to play the game.

www.play4guidance.eu