"Our project, “We little XXI century explorers, ready to map and code out territory”, in partnership with Croatia, Poland, Lithuania, and Italy as coordinator, has had as main target children ranging from 3 to 14 years of age. The project has focused on two main fields, seemingly unconnected one to the other, but becoming, afterwards, complementary: -the exploring of known and unknown locations and monuments of our territory, ( to develop in our children a major awareness of their surroundings); -and the study of the new computational technique of ""coding”. Thus, our pupils have become “little explorers”, searching locations, monuments or objects, reconsidered by them for their important past, and learning, by research work and interviews to elder people living in the territory, all the historical and artistic value concerning them. This part of our project work has aroused, in a significant way, the awareness of our local surroundings. Then, like little geographers, they have traced ancient and current trails or paths leading to them and, using ""coding"", they have produced paper and virtual coded maps to share. They have also represented these coded paths and the storytelling of their local sites and monuments, producing many Scratch projects, bettering logical and ICT skills. All this work has been brought forward by the children, using our community language, which is English, thus developing foreign language skills in a meaningful way. The results we’ve obtained in all our partner schools have been amazing; what we initially thought to be ambitious (coding), has aroused interest and involvement in all our project participants (children and adults), and also in people outside the project, like teachers in other schools in our territory. With teaching “coding” to our children, they have learnt to face and cope with problem situations, understanding that they need to be faced gradually and in order of logical succession; algorithms have been very useful in conveying this type of computational thinking; our children have learnt to approach problem situations by reason, by assuming step by step solutions and acquiring knowledge “using their own mind” (coding)."

Our project can be briefly described as the project of writing the continuation of the novel 'Les Misérables' by Victor HUGO, the master of French literature, who is a world classic in the field of literature and tells the subject in a striking language with the message of universal human love. The intention to write the sequel of the novel is not to change the ending; The aim is for the students to continue the novel by using their creativity from where the author puts the point in the last sentence at the end of the book. This project was implemented in our own school in 2015 and very positive results were obtained from our project. In this project, the students of all our strategic partners – including our own students – read the novel 'Les Miserables', which was written with the number of pages appropriate for their age, and discussed the characters, plot, place and time elements of the novel among themselves and with their teachers. They watched the 1998 movie, a beautiful adaptation of 'Les Miserables', and they took a 25-question test prepared by the language teachers of each school. After these activities, the students asked themselves the following question: 'If I were Victor HUGO living today, how would I continue the Les Miserables novel from where it left off?' With this question, our students put themselves in Victor HUGO's place and emulated such a master writer, remained true to the novel characters and developed them. They continued the novel. There was no limit to the number of pages in the continuation articles written by the students. As the coordinating school, we examined the follow-up letters written by the students of the four partner schools, including ourselves, in our education activities. We transferred all the articles to digital media. A total of 180 students from four partner schools participated in our project. However, the articles written by these students were screened by language teachers with criteria such as language, expression, subject integrity and style. As a result, we decided that the works of 46 students were worth publishing as a book. In addition, the language teachers translated the writings of each student in their own language into English, which we will determine as the common language. The works of the students, which we found worthy of publication, were printed by the printing house contracted with the Ministry of Finance in our country, in the numbers and novel sizes that we determined with the partners. These printed works were sent to partner schools by the coordinator school. In addition, each partner country compiled the follow-up articles of their students in their own language and in English and shared them with the partner schools. The PDF version of our book, which has been turned into a book, has been shared free of charge on the social media platform of our project and on the special website www.lesmiserables41.net. Some LTT activities that could not be done face-to-face due to the pandemic were held in the virtual environment. A special notebook was created for our project by teachers and students. A pen pal with the theme of Les Miserables was started among the project students. As of October 2018, promotional posters of our project have been hung in each partner school. Our project was also advertised with stationery items such as t-shirts, caps, agendas and scrapbooks from the project budget, specific to the name of our project. The books we printed in the printing house were distributed free of charge to students, teachers, parents, and the surrounding school and institution directorates. Necessary promotion and dissemination activities were initiated in schools. Our aim in this project, which is mostly aimed at middle school and/or high school students, is to strengthen the skills of the students in the field of creative writing and to adopt the idea that they will produce a new work as a result of their creative thinking power. That's why we aim to strengthen the ties between liking books and basic literacy. Based on the idea that 'everything starts with loving a book', we aim to help middle and/or high school students believe that they can be good writers if desired, that they can create their own books, and thus develop their creativity skills. Reading, value and interest in a work created by them will increase the emotional and cognitive levels of the students and they will feel themselves as individuals integrated with the society. With all these efforts, we have a positive impact on the cognitive and emotional intelligence of students in the field of creative writing, which is among their EU 2020 targets; We will help 15-year-old students achieve goals such as reducing the failure rate below 15%, reducing the early school leaving rate below 10%, increasing the quality and efficiency of education and training, and learning at least one foreign language in addition to their mother tongue for all EU citizens.