After 10 months of work, the FINANCEn_LAB Project partners met in Kielce for the first transnational meeting of the Project. This meeting was held at Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce. The meeting was hosted by the most wonderful hosts, professors, and project partners Beata Banach-Rząca, Joanna Rudawska, and Ana Kaminska. This meeting had a hybrid format because of the situation generated by COVID-19: the Spanish partners, CITICAN, UVa. and FUNIBER, were able to participate face-to-face, and the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași in Romania, and The Vision Works (tvw GmbH) from Germany, joined online.
It was two days of fruitful work where the partners had the pleasure to interact for the first time with the digital simulator for financial education. The central point of the meeting was the presentation of the digital tool for financial education developed by José Manuel Breñosa and his team of engineers from CITICAN. Part of the meeting was to prepare in advance the Pilot Learning Activity which will be taking place for several months. This preparation activity was led by José Manuel, the leading engineer of the Project. During the preparation of the Pilot Learning Activity, FINANCEn_LAB members learned how the simulator works.
This tool, the simulator, is designed to support the teaching-learning process of students of HEI, FP, and Business Schools, also to be managed by teachers or trainers of those students. Some technical details of the simulator, to highlight, are its design: it is based on Three Layers: the first, Framework for Cases: HTML5, the second, Framework for Courses: Moodle, and finally, Database: PHP.
The result looks like this:
It is intuitive, with functionalities exquisitely thought out for its function as a pedagogical support tool. With this tool, the students will have autonomy but also the necessity of studying the materials provided by the teacher into the platform to complete the fields of each phase of the project. The student can open more than one project at a time and make comparisons of several elements during the process. The structure of the different projects at the platform may be similar, but in fact, there are thousands of combinations to explore every time the student wants to start over. Depending on the choices made by the students, and because of the information each student used to fill in the fields, they will get different results and the proper evaluation from the teacher. The teacher has several ways to follow the progress of his students and will have the possibility to select the most comfortable ones according to his daily routine. In one way or the other, the teacher and the student will always be in communication.
The whole FINANCEn_LAB team concluded the Kielce meeting tremendously enthusiastic and eager to take the next step with this great tool which is going to delight both, teachers, and students!
