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home > Media services > News > eMapps.com project launched in Prague eMapps.com project launched in Prague The eMapps.com project, of which European Schoolnet is a partner, had its kick-off meeting early October 2005 in Prague. The project will run for 30 months. eMapps.com is an eLearning project funded under the European Union IST programme to develop an interactive map based game environment running on multiple devices and networks for primary school children aged 9-12. The games will be developed mainly in schools in the New Member States of the EU, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovak Republic and Slovenia. The use of games in education is becoming an emerging issue. eMapps aims to involve children and teachers actively in the creation of games accessible through mobile devices and the Internet and in the generating of cultural content that will be exchanged between countries. European Schoolnet is involved in three main tasks, research and policy analysis, pedagogical validation and the sharing of elearning content. EUN will carry out ground clearing desk research on the use of ICT in these countries, survey national /regional policies and curricula frameworks to draw conclusions for their suitability to integrate and develop games in school education. Together with the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) , EUN will develop an evaluation toolkit based on the pedagogical framework which underpins the project and evaluate the learning impact, accessibility and usability of the game environment. This will be tested during a summer school and regional workshops involving children and teachers as users. Exchange of digital content plays a key role in eMapps.com. Digital resources (e.g., images, sounds, movies) are one of the ingredients used by teachers to prepare games. These resources can be directly produced by the teachers (for example with a digital camera), downloaded from the Internet, or obtained by searching the EUN Federation of Internet Resources for Education (FIRE), which is a network of repositories of learning resources. In addition, EUN is developing an eMapps.com repository. This repository will be connected to FIRE, It will be used by teachers to share, under creative commons licenses, the best of the digital materials (including games) created during the project. The project will have a kick off conference 17 February 2006 in Prague, where it will assess the value of its approach through consultation with leading experts in the wider spheres of games technology, narrative design, mobile applications, eLearning, technology in the school curriculum, and content access technologies. Ciberespacio, Spain
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