BEACONING stands for Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning and will focus on ‘anytime anywhere’ learning by exploiting pervasive, context-aware and gamified techniques and technologies, framed under the Problem-Based Learning approach.

BEACONING’s concept is to digitally enable play-learn in everyday spaces fostering cross-subject learning, facilitated by personified gamified lesson plan where context-aware educational resources and ad-hoc learning in the surrounding environment can be triggered. BEACONING pragmatically addresses the needs of disabled learners, who are engaging with general education.

BEACONING sets a forefront in multifaceted education technologies through large-scale piloting of a digital learning platform that blend physical and digital spaces. As innovation action strategies, pilots combine opportunities for new ICTs in multiple ways that merge learning acquired in formal, non-formal and informal means, developing the skills for today’s abled and disabled learners and workforce. The BEACONING platform will be a ubiquitous solution that exploits advances in user experience design, mobile communication, location-based and context aware systems, procedural content generation, pedagogy-driven gamification, learning analytics and cloud technology through innovative integration towards a blended learning space.

The BEACONING demonstrator will facilitate, assess and author gamified learning activities, integrating existing educational tools and services of the participating organisations. Focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the cross-subject approach embedded in a Problem-Based Learning model will contextualise learning within real world problem solving and applications.