<< Objectives >>SAYL enables young children (3-5) to engage in new adventurous stories. The project aims to build a book platform that includes excellent interactive digital stories in the majority and minority languages used in the five participating countries (Germany, Malta, Norway, the Netherlands, and Turkey). The platform is online and constructed to allow free access through most modern devices. The platform can thus make books available to children for various reasons deprived of good picture books.<< Implementation >>The books will have multimedia features that make them helpful in supporting meaning-making. In addition, the books include the possibility of adapting the semantic richness to children's narrative understanding, choosing a language, and interacting with audio, video, and animation. We present the books on a platform that provides, apart from access, the possibility to select a book and a language. Furthermore, it is equipped with features to motivate children to return to the platform.<< Results >>We expect the book platform to increase and enrich book reading in ECEC organizations and families. In addition, families' close cooperation with ECEC organizations due to access to the same books can bolster a book reading routine in families. Furthermore, the platform may boost book reading, particularly in disadvantaged groups, like immigrant children, children speaking a minority language, or children deprived of good picture books due to socio-economic factors or a pandemic.

"Launched in November 2018 and over its 24 months of duration, the project had the priority objective of experimenting in the education chain (secondary and tertiary education and training segments), the application of new training methods and teaching methodologies focused on the use of virtual reality (augmented, extended, mixed), in order to assess the innovation of these technologies and related forms of learning, both in terms of innovation of curricula and benefits for trainees. The constant collaboration between the partners and the direct involvement of stakeholders, first of all, the companies of the aerospace supply chains of the different partner countries (Italy, Spain, Poland, Norway), has allowed to obtain all the expected results. The intellectual products developed, are the following: 1) COMPARED RESEARCH ON KEY COMPETENCE FACTORS IN THE AEROSPACE SECTOR: the output aims to systematize the results of the needs analysis carried out in the field in the different countries of the partnership, through the administration of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to HR managers of companies in the sector. The action of qualitative analysis in the field has involved a total of 14 companies, Poland, 8 Italy, 5 Spain, 3 Norway. 2) REPERTORY OF GOOD PRACTICES ON THE USE OF TECHNICAL COMPETENCES: the digitization of production processes, as well as the innovation of production techniques in the field of advanced mechanics and aerospace, require the availability on the market of skills and profiles able to metabolize and govern these innovations. This also implies the need for the actors of the training system to increase their ability and speed of response in providing training proposals that meet and anchor the demands of economic operators. The repertoire of good practices represents a common and available knowledge base to enhance experiences carried out in different educational contexts, through immersive training that can constitute a methodology capable of reducing the learning time of future ""professionals"" in the sector. 3) GUIDELINES FOR THE DESIGN, MANAGEMENT, EVALUATION OF TECHNICAL CURRICULAR TRAINING INTERVENTIONS THROUGH THE METHODOLOGY OF IMMERSIVE TRAINING: the guidelines will bring to value the results of the pilot training courses carried out by the partners with target groups of students, teachers and trainers in each country and within secondary and tertiary training courses. The output will be a milestone of the project also in a perspective of sharing and debate with operators, companies, institutional actors. In the European panorama, as well as in the Italian context, I-TRACE has been characterized by a strong innovation and originality, aimed at starting a joint reflection between VET providers, industrial leaders, companies, policy makers to assess the extent of innovation of the immersive training methodology and its possible applications in educational contexts at different levels of technical education."

The motivation for this proposal is that the global reliance on fossil fuels is set to increase with the rapid growth of Asian economies and major discoveries of shale gas in developed nations. The strategic vision of the IDC is to develop a world-leading Centre for Industrial Doctoral Training focussed on delivering research leaders and next-generation innovators with broad economic, societal and contextual awareness, having strong technical skills and capable of operating in multi-disciplinary teams covering a range of knowledge transfer, deployment and policy roles. They will be able to analyse the overall economic context of projects and be aware of their social and ethical implications. These skills will enable them to contribute to stimulating UK-based industry to develop next-generation technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and ultimately improve the UK's position globally through increased jobs and exports. The Centre will involve over 50 recognised academics in carbon capture & storage (CCS) and cleaner fossil energy to provide comprehensive supervisory capacity across the theme for 70 doctoral students. It will provide an innovative training programme co-created in collaboration with our industrial partners to meet their advanced skills needs. The industrial letters of support demonstrate a strong need for the proposed Centre in terms of research to be conducted and PhDs that will be produced, with 10 new companies willing to join the proposed Centre including EDF Energy, Siemens, BOC Linde and Caterpillar, together with software companies, such as ANSYS, involved with power plant and CCS simulation. We maintain strong support from our current partners that include Doosan Babcock, Alstom Power, Air Products, the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), Tata Steel, SSE, RWE npower, Johnson Matthey, E.ON, CPL Industries, Clean Coal Ltd and Innospec, together with the Biomass & Fossil Fuels Research Alliance (BF2RA), a grouping of companies across the power sector. Further, we have engaged SMEs, including CMCL Innovation, 2Co Energy, PSE and C-Capture, that have recently received Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)/Technology Strategy Board (TSB)/ETI/EC support for CCS projects. The active involvement companies have in the research projects, make an IDC the most effective form of CDT to directly contribute to the UK maintaining a strong R&D base across the fossil energy power and allied sectors and to meet the aims of the DECC CCS Roadmap in enabling industry to define projects fitting their R&D priorities. The major technical challenges over the next 10-20 years identified by our industrial partners are: (i) implementing new, more flexible and efficient fossil fuel power plant to meet peak demand as recognised by electricity market reform incentives in the Energy Bill, with efficiency improvements involving materials challenges and maximising biomass use in coal-fired plant; (ii) deploying CCS at commercial scale for near-zero emission power plant and developing cost reduction technologies which involves improving first-generation solvent-based capture processes, developing next-generation capture processes, and understanding the impact of impurities on CO2 transport and storage; (iimaximising the potential of unconventional gas, including shale gas, 'tight' gas and syngas produced from underground coal gasification; and (iii) developing technologies for vastly reduced CO2 emissions in other industrial sectors: iron and steel making, cement, refineries, domestic fuels and small-scale diesel power generatort and These challenges match closely those defined in EPSRC's Priority Area of 'CCS and cleaner fossil energy'. Further, they cover biomass firing in conventional plant defined in the Bioenergy Priority Area, where specific issues concern erosion, corrosion, slagging, fouling and overall supply chain economics.

In Europe one in five people lacks adequate reading skills. Additionally, research shows that the amount of time spend reading is in decline and becoming more intermittent and fragmented. This is alarming, since recent empirical research shows that literary reading, by virtue of its appeal to first-person experience, yields unique cognitive and emotional benefits, such as enhancing the capacity for empathy, social inference, and emotional self-regulation. To arrive at a deeper understanding of how reading literature can lead to positive societal effects, more fundamental research is needed first. We need to clarify the (neuro)-cognitive processes that are crucial to literary reading in theoretical models. Model development should go hand in hand with the elaboration of novel empirical methods to test them. In addition, we need to investigate forms of narrative engagement and types of literary texts in which empathy plays an important role. Narrative engagement is an important contributor to reading enjoyment. Once these processes and literary experiences are mapped out, we can explore the effects of literary reading on mental well-being. To answer these questions, we propose to set up an ETN that aims to train a new generation of innovative and interdisciplinary researchers in the empirical study of literature: The Empirical Study of Literature Training Network (ELIT). As there are currently no interdisciplinary doctoral programs available across Europe, we developed a new program that revolves around comprehensive and integrative training that emphasizes the multidimensionality of reading. ELIT will stimulate true interdisciplinary research: our doctoral candidates will combine theory-driven approaches with various empirical methods. We will be collaborating closely with a range of non-academic partners to draw in valuable insights about how reading can fulfil certain societal needs.