In recent times, there has been a growing recognition of the imperative to equip school students with competencies and skills that are essential for the evolving landscape of the future. This acknowledgment reflects the changing demands of our world, emphasizing the need for innovative thinking and adaptability. To address this, a promising avenue involves the integration of multidisciplinary, multilicence project-based learning activities into the educational framework. This transformative approach is geared towards creating innovative thinkers and creators who will be well-equipped to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. The STEAME Teacher Facilitators Academy emerges as a response to this educational imperative, aiming to meet the growing demand for competency and skills development in school students through immersive multidisciplinary project-based learning. The academy's focal point is the transformation of schools into STEAME (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, and Entrepreneurship) project-based learning environments. Operating at the local level, these academies have a strategic objective of empowering teacher facilitators with the necessary tools and knowledge. Recognizing that numerous educators currently lack the essential resources for effective project-based learning, particularly in STEAME fields, the project offers comprehensive training to bridge this gap through comprehensive training programs. In doing so, it aspires to foster a generation of better-prepared students.

Sustainable education has many facets involving not only the conservation of our natural ecosystem and the development of a sustainable society but also promoting equity and ensuring lifelong learning opportunities for all regardless of any handicaps or circumstances. UNESCO, through its Sustainable Development Goals, and the European Commission through several programs, push the society and the universities to promote Quality Education as a core asset of modern societies in the digital era. The ATHENA European University implements a novel Educational Model that was designed to advance inclusive and sustainable education and place the university educational assets to the service of the local community and the society at large. ATHENA is a European University of seven higher education institutions, aimed to nurture the development of all-inclusive digitalization of societies. The educational model of ATHENA is based on several initiatives and novel pedagogies to advance green education and inclusion at the European Higher Education Area. At this paper we describe the general architecture of the ATHENA Joint Education Model and its pillars such as blended mobility and Competence Clusters.

Nowadays, environmental stability and a sustainable development are endangered for different reasons, such as species extinction, biodiversity loss and habitats destruction. Thus, educational serious games have grown to be extremely relevant for raising awareness and enhancing knowledge on sustainability, fostering behavioral change for the stability and maintenance of our biosphere. ZooLector is one such game. This game was developed within the scope of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, including education (goal 4) and biodiversity (goal 15). The game consists in assembling animal cards collections from all over the world through a pack opening mechanic. The purpose is to enhance the knowledge of players about extinction and biodiversity loss in the animal kingdom. This is an inclusive and accessible game for all students-players, assured by color-blind support and a voice assistant, following concerns of creating inclusive, accessible, and equal opportunities for all students. ZooLector is an approach towards animal-awareness, pro-sustainability behaviors and engagement in sustainable activities, that is primarily thought to be used as an educational and inclusive tool.

Individuals with hearing disabilities face numerous obstacles with regards to the practice of tourism activities and the use of infrastructure and services. Cultural settings are far from being inclusive for deaf tourists. The lack of knowledge of sign language among the non-deaf population is an obstacle. The ICHT – Inclusive Cultural Heritage Tourism project is expected to bring R&D world-class results in the field of automatic sign language translation to raise awareness to sign language and to motivate touristic operators to learn the basis of sign language communication to welcome and assist deaf tourists. Reducing barriers to the communication between deaf tourists and local touristic operators is expected to develop inclusive and innovative tools to promote accessibility and inclusion.

Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in engineering curricula. In the Blended Academic International Mobility course, Blended-AIM, students develop their capstone project as members of an international and multidisciplinary team while working at their home institutions. Team members are geographically spread to assure heterogeneous teams and to promote international cooperation. This paradigm, although very suited for engineering degrees, can be adapted and applied in any project/internship course unit. The results from the first 10 editions of the course that ran between 2009/10 and 2018/19 support our initial hypothesis that Blended-AIM significantly promotes students’ soft skills without requiring costly and time consuming changes to prior degree curricula. It has the additional benefit of tearing down most of the barriers to international mobility in a sustainable way. In 2019/20 we are running the 11th, edition of the course and planning to transfer this innovative educational paradigm to new partners outside EU borders.

Over the last years, there has been an increase in hearing-impaired students who use sign language as their main form of communication attending higher education institutions around the world. The knowledge that their comprehension of texts is reduced due to sentence structure differences causes a need for more solutions to improve communication and support students in environments where they are unable to be accompanied by sign interpreters. This article details the improvements and current structure of the VirtualSign platform, a bidirectional sign language to text translation tool that has been in development since 2015. The platform is divided into two main parts, sign to text and text to sign, and both components are described and explained. The solution has received positive feedback on several tests and a pilot experiment, and is being developed with partnerships with sign interpreters from six different European countries. Some planned improvements and future functionalities for the tool are also mentioned and detailed.

Deaf and blind students face communication barrierst that are constantly present in their daily lives. These barriers arise naturally since the deaf community, the blind community and the rest of the students and teachers use different languages and different channels to communicate. These barriers have a significant impact in the academic, personal and professional development of deaf and blind students. Using automatic tools to assist the fluid communication between people using different languages and different channels of communication might significantly promote the social inclusion of disabled students. In this paper we describe the ACE architecture which incorporates VirtualSign, a translator for sign language and other components to allow for the real time translation between sign and oral languages. This architecture supports any sign language. We expect ACE will provide ways for the fluid communication among deaf people, blind people and those not constrained by these disabilities.

The communication with deaf by means of written text is not as efficient as it might seem at first. In fact, there is a very deep gap between sign language and spoken/written language. The vocabulary, the sentence construction and the grammatical rules are quite different among these two worlds. These facts bring significant difficulties in reading and understanding the meaning of text for deaf people and, on the other hand, make it quite difficult for people with no hearing disabilities to understand sign language. The deployment of tools to assist the daily communication, in schools, in public services, in museums and other, between deaf people and the rest may be a significant contribution to the social inclusion of the deaf community. The work described in this paper addresses the development of a bidirectional translator between Portuguese Sign Language and Portuguese text and a serious game to promote the learning of the Portuguese Sign Language. The translator from sign language to text resorts to two devices, namely the Microsoft Kinect and 5DT Sensor Gloves in order to gather data about the motion and shape of the hands. The hands configurations are classified using Support Vector Machines. The classification of the movement and orientation of the hands is achieved through the use of Dynamic Time Warping algorithm. The translator exhibits a precision higher than 90%. In the other direction, the translation of Portuguese text to Portuguese Sign Language is supported by a 3D avatar which interprets the entered text and performs the corresponding animations. As a complement, we also present a serious game directed to assist in the difficult task of learning the Portuguese Sign Language.

Over the last decade the interest in social virtual worlds as tools to improve the teaching/learning process and to stimulate knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy, has greatly increased as a result of their promising potential. In the current work we introduce a concise definition of a social virtual world and make a comparative analysis between different virtual worlds based on Mannien's matrix. For this study, Second Life, Active Worlds and There were selected as they are the virtual environments most commonly addressed by the academic community. Finally, we discuss the potential of social virtual worlds for educational purposes.