According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in an increasingly complex world children need to develop higher level thinking skills in order to find solutions to social, emotional and economic problems, both personally and in the context of the wider world. In order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century, children need to be creative, innovative, enterprising and adaptable, with the motivation, confidence and skills to use creative and critical thinking purposefully. The Creative School project responds to this need by delivering creative and critical thinking educational approaches into schools through engagement with the cultural sector, specifically museums, galleries, and science centres.The Creative School builds on the outcomes of two previous Erasmus+ funded projects: The Creative Museum (2014-1-FR01-KA202- 008678) and the Making Museum (2017-1-FR01-KA202- 037487), by providing opportunities to generate and evaluate knowledge, clarify concepts and ideas, seek possibilities, consider alternatives and solve problems. The Creative School project aims to use the creative and innovative methods and tools developed throughout the Creative and Making Museum projects and apply them to develop learning modules for children and school teachers. These modules will promote self-directed learning, critical and visual thinking skills by using cultural heritage content made available by the full and associate partner organisations. The project will achieve this in a number of ways: firstly, through an analysis of training and information needs of teachers, educators, children and also parents; secondly, by producing a set of training materials focusing on the development of thinking skills through engagement with cultural heritage and thirdly, through the creation set of guidelines and recommendations aimed at influencing policy makers and curriculum decision makers. The main beneficiaries of the project include primary and secondary school teachers, who, through engaging with the project will become equipped with the skills necessary to facilitate pedagogical strategies for creativity and critical thinking. Children and young people involved as participants in the Creative School project will develop the skills required to respond to the challenges offered by the Creative School curriculum. The project will also explore the possible mobilisation of digital cultural heritage and engagement with maker spaces models, as tools to create unusual and exciting learning opportunities.Here maker spaces are intended as community-operated workspaces, where people with common interests in technology, science, heritage and art, can meet, socialize and collaborate.The project will provide teachers, educators and children the chance to engage with a wide range of subject matter and themes including innovation, STEAM (science, technology, arts and mathematics), sustainable development, urban regeneration, social innovation and entrepreneurship. The project brings together nine project partners from eight countries and six of the partners have worked together on the Making Museum and Creative Museum projects. The project partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking and with working with schools and young people. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.

The economic downturn of the last years has impacted youth and adult populations throughout Europe. A major concern is the rise in unemployment and prevailing lack of opportunities to develop and improve skills of EU citizens. The EU Strategy acknowledges that education and training can help tackle key challenges, while the cultural sector is becoming more and more one of the key successful elements of new forms of socio-economic development. The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions;- creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.The background context from which the project originates, comes from the mass digitisation process in the field of cultural heritage, that made available the huge amount of contents in European galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Despite its enormous potential (about 60 million items are included in Europeana), browsing the records interesting for the students to perform learning tasks is strongly limited by shortage of metadata describing the cultural objects themselves. E.g., if you look for paintings depicting a renaissance landscape, and the descriptors of Mona Lisa are only “Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre”, this record will be never displayed, thus frustrating the student experience.To overcome this problem, the CrowdHeritage project created an online tool using the power of crowdsourcing (i.e. the joint effort of students who collectively annotate a picture with its key characteristics) to improve quality of metadata and increase the fruition. Some schools have been already involved in 2019 in the piloting phase, however it is time now to start using the platform in a more structured way.The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps: 1) teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school; 2) cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes; 3) jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated in different languages, in order to retrieve an item also if it has been annotated in a language different from the one of the users performing the inquiry; 4) the students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query; 5) annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group, who will be requested to justify the reason for the non-acceptance of the proposed annotations. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme, in order to provide higher scores to the pupils who are more creative in the annotation process and whose tags were less subject to the critical revision of their peers; 6) finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students more effective in the first pilot action will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme.The key results expected by the CrowdSchool project are:- training teachers to use the CrowdHeritage tools;- customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective;- acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach;- promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations;- increasing awareness of the European teachers community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities.The project brings together ten partners from six countries and four of them have worked together in CrowdHeritage. The partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.