The GI-Pedagogy project supports and equips teachers to bring Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into the classroom in innovative and effective ways. The project has two aims: first, to review existing pedagogies relating to GIS and to develop effective and innovative new approaches; and second, to embed those approaches through a combination of teacher training and resource provision. The focus of the project is on giving teachers the training they need to fully incorporate web-based mapping software into the geography curriculum. The GI-Pedagogy project will produce a toolkit of resources for teachers, available for free on the project website. Once a toolkit for teaching with GIS is developed, this resource will be shared and disseminated via in-person training events and online.GI-Pedagogy responds to teacher and student demand for more digital and web-based approaches to teaching and learning. It also developed in part from the findings of a previous EU-funded project, the School on the Cloud. The project partners include three universities, two secondary schools, and a professional body. Together, the six partners will develop and trial innovative teaching approaches. A new pedagogy for teaching with GIS will be refined in partnership, and through continuous feedback between teacher training and research institutions, front-line educators, and professional geographers. Surveys will be used to monitor the experiences of participating teachers at our two partner schools and at other associate institutions. This stage of the project includes a rigorous survey of existing approaches to teaching with GIS along with a review assessing the effectiveness of new pedagogies.Following this development phase, the project partners will create a toolkit of resources for teachers based on the most effective strategies for teaching with GIS. The toolkit will be available online, along with a MOOC demonstrating how the toolkit can best be applied in the classroom. These online resources will be supplemented by our six multiplier events: a series of face-to-face training sessions for around 140 participants, hosted at the project's partner institutions. At the conclusion of the project, the final results will be made available as part of a digital exhibition. This will also document the experiences of the partners, and particularly of those teachers who were involved in trialling and applying the project's new pedagogy as part of their own teaching practice.The impact of this project will continue even after its completion, as the practices and principles developed will be embedded in the culture of the partner institutions and in the classrooms of those teachers who attended the training or who made use of its online resources. Several partner institutions have pledged funding to ensure that these resources remain freely accessible even after the conclusion of any EU grant. Not only will the project benefit those teachers and students who are direct participants in the development of a new pedagogy, but also those who undertake teacher training at the partner institutions after the life-cycle of the project has ended. By giving teachers the resources and training they need to embed new GIS technologies in their curriculum, GI-Pedagogy is also equipping students with the digital skills they need for the geography of the future.

This project aims to understand the role of effort in the reproduction of social inequality. While large-scale test programs like PISA have produced impressive amounts of data on the determinants of cognitive abilities, there is scant evidence on socio-economic differences in cognitive effort. Better understanding the social origins of effort pushes the frontier of knowledge on intergenerational mobility and allows improving equality of opportunity. Specifically, the aim of the project is to answer three research questions: 1. To what extent do children’s effort levels differ by parental socioeconomic background? (descriptive component) 2. Can existing disparities in effort by social background be explained by (a) the intergenerational transmission of effort from parents to children, and (b) varying motivations and differential susceptibility to incentives? (analytical component) 3. What are the best techniques to measure cognitive effort and what are the strengths and weaknesses of measures routinely used in different scientific disciplines? (methodological component) The project will develop and exploit cutting-edge methods of effort measurement such as real-effort tasks and psychophysiological techniques like pupillometry. Their immense potential has remained untapped in inequality research thus far. Experimental data will be collected for a large sample of school-age children and their parents in Spain and Germany. Subjective effort dispositions will be further analyzed using (inter)national surveys. The triangulation of carefully chosen methodologies will provide the first reliable evidence on socioeconomic differences in effort and stimulate new research (e.g. on gender or ethnic differentials in effort). Cross-validation analysis will detect possible biases of commonly used effort measures. The research findings will provide valuable insights for educational practitioners and decisive evidence for normative debates about social inequality and policy design.

Application of Solar Thermal Energy to Processes (ASTEP) will create a new innovative Solar Heating for Industrial Processes (SHIP) concept focused on overcoming the current limitations of these systems. This solution is based on modular and flexible integration of two innovative designs for the solar collector (SunDial) and the Thermal Energy Storage (TES, based on Phase Change Materials, PCM) integrated via a control system which will allow flexible operation to maintain continuous service against the unpredictable nature of the solar source and partially during night operation. ASTEP will demonstrate its capability to cover a substantial part of the heat demand of the process industry at temperatures above 150 ºC and for latitudes where current designs are not able to supply it. Its modularity and compactness will also enable easy installation and repair with reduced space requirements, while most of components can be sourced locally. The ASTEP`s process integration will allow full compatibility with the existing systems of potential end-users of SHIP. These aspects will provide a very competitive solution to substitute fossil fuel consumption. The developed solar concept will be tested at two industrial sites to prove the objective’s target of TRL5. Life Cycle Analysis will be included to validate and demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed technologies. The first Industrial Site of the proposal is the world’s leading steel company, ArcelorMittal, with a heating demand above 220 ºC for a factory located at a latitude of 47.1 N (Iasi, Romania). The second site is the dairy company MANDREKAS, located at a latitude of 37.93 N (Corinth, Greece) with a heating demand for steam at 175 ºC and a cooling demand at 5 ºC. These test locations will validate the ASTEP solution for a substantial part of the potential requirements of industrial heating and cooling demand of the European Union (EU28), which is estimated at approximately 72 TWh per year