The educational kit is a toolkit for secondary school teachers aimed at providing to both teachers and students STEAM education.

The toolkit will address specifically STEAM teachers and students, in particular it will focus on developing training materials and activities that suit also for students with special educational needs in order to allow inclusive and efficient STEAM education.

The Educational Kit will be aimed at the development of key skills deriving from STEAM education such as critical thinking, process-based learning, asking important questions, problem-solving and creativity.

In terms of audience, the development of such skills becomes even more crucial when it comes to students with SEN: for this reason the toolkit will be developed in order to address especially this target group.

In order to assure the transferability of the toolkit, it will be developed in order to be used both online – at home, in classroom, within therapeutic curriculum – as it will be uploaded in an interactive version on the project website and in classroom.

This approach will assure on the one hand a wider use also beyond schools and on the other hand an easier accessibility to other countries. For this reason, key activities from the Toolkit will be translated in national languages (EN, PT, IT, LT, EL, BG).

The aim of this laboratory, is on the basis of enquiry-based learning (EBL) to practically validate and use among teachers and students the toolkit.

In particular, the laboratory will focus on a particular topic: Robotics. In this way not only the laboratory will provide experiential learning on an innovative pedagogical practice (robotics) allowing students to experiment and acquire new skills, but also will provide a learning environment based on collaborative practices that will allow inclusion and cooperation within all students, especially among students with SEN.

Moreover, such a cooperative approach will guarantee the acquisition of key skills such as group dynamics’ awareness, team building and working, conflict resolution.

In order to assure a high level of transferability of the output, students who will be involved into the laboratory, will also record some videos related to the project idea to be enclosed into the Toolkit: the video will be enclosed into the online version of the Educational Kit (IO1) and a description of the project will be instead included into the paper version of the Kit. For this reason, videos and projects’ descriptions will be translated in national languages in order to allow other schools to access and see concrete and applied examples of the toolkit.

Inclusive education of people with SEN is often framed in terms of human rights or justice. Notwithstanding, the economic dimension for educating people with disabilities is also very relevant. Lack of appropriate education remains the key risk factor for poverty and exclusion of any person, whether they are disabled or not.

One of the key Europe 2020 targets is to have 'at least 20 millions fewer people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion'. In addition, the 4th of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals stated in UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is “Guaranteeing equal and accessible education by building inclusive learning environments and providing the needed assistance for persons with disabilities”.

This shows the great importance social inclusion has at European and International level and it demonstrates the strong need for: -transnational cooperation among Member States; -an integrated approach involving schools and relevant stakeholders such as policy makers, associations and NGOs; -political measures for promoting and supporting social inclusion Europe wide.

In this sense, the IO3 provides innovative guidelines for several reasons:

1. They are addressing directly managers and policy makers responsible for effective change and policy implementation at national and transnational level
2. Guidelines and recommendation will enforce and disseminate the need to put into practice Quality Assurance at educational level in order to ensure the application of Quality culture
3. The main focus for these recommendations are promotion of social inclusion through the adoption of innovative learning practices. Because of the importance at transnational level that this output has in order to trigger social and political change, the summary of the Guidelines will be provided in all national languages while the Manifesto will be fully translated in PT, IT, LT, EL, BG in order to have a wider political audience.