Fortissimo 2 will drive the uptake of advanced modelling, simulation and data analytics by European engineering and manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps. Such an uptake will deliver improved design processes, better products and services, and improved competitiveness. For the European Union as a whole this means improved employment opportunities and economic growth. The importance of advanced ICT to the competitiveness of both large and small companies in the engineering and manufacturing domain is well established. Despite early successes in this area, there are still many barriers to the uptake of such solutions, not least of which are the initial cost and complexity of adoption, particularly in the context of challenging trading conditions. This proposal targets the ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs (I4MS) action line (Phase 2) and builds on Phase 1 of that initiative. Phase 2 addresses the adoption of next generation ICT advances in the manufacturing domain. At the core of Fortissimo 2 are three tranches of Application Experiments (~35 in total). An initial set is included in this proposal and two further sets will be obtained through Open Calls for proposals. These experiments will be driven by the requirements of first-time users (predominately SMEs) and will bring together actors from across the value chain, from cycle providers to domain experts via the Fortissimo Marketplace. This will enable innovative solutions to manufacturing challenges, leading to new and improved design processes, products and services. A key feature of Fortissimo 2 will be the adaption of the Marketplace to meet the needs of end-users. It will offer a responsive and reliable service to companies which want to access HPC and Big resources and expertise. Fortissimo 2 initially involves 732 months of effort, a total cost of €11.1m and EC funding of €10m over a duration of three years, commensurate with achieving its ambitious goals.

Whilst youth unemployment in general has increased in Europe, there is a group of young people who are dis-proportionally threatened by exclusion from the labour market and society - youngsters between 15 and 25 years who have survived childhood cancer and are trying to find their way back to life, work and education. Research has shown, that increased risks of unemployment were observed within all cancer diagnoses. More than two-thirds of childhood cancer survivors experience late effects. Childhood Cancer Survivors also have higher risk factors for poor educational attainment, less than optimal employment status, and interpersonal relationship issues. Create your Future has established a career counselling programme for Childhood Cancer Survivors that does not only address the educational and labour market perspective but also integrates psychosocial and medical factors in order to look at the individual as a whole. This Career Counselling was individually tailored to each Childhood Cancer Survivor in order to take into account their special needs, stresses and straints. For this purpose, close cooperation between health staff and adult educators was an important element of the Career Counselling Programme in order to assure best possible support for Childhood Cancer Survivors. Within Create your Future around 50 adult educators/trainers/counselors in the 4 partner countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and Spain were trained to be able to perform Career Counselling for Childhood Cancer Survivors and 60 Childhood Cancer Survivors did participate in the Career Counselling during the project duration.The main objectives of Create your Future were:• to raise awareness about the individual needs of childhood cancer survivors and sensitize the general public as well as the economy about these needs and the importance as well as benefits of integrating Childhood Cancer Survivors in the labour market• to foster employability of Childhood Cancer Survivors by developing career perspectives with them in individual counselling sessions by also addressing psycho-social factors• to enhance the development of key competences of Childhood Cancer Survivors by providing them individual assessment and learning offers• to foster equity and inclusion in education by creating pathways to education and training allowing participation of the disadvantaged group of cancer patients• to contribute to the professionalization of adult educators by providing tailor-made in-service training which enables them to work as trainer and coach of the beneficiaries• to bring about lasting change by embedding the learning and counselling offers in a comprehensive system which includes quality assurance and sustainabilityThe impact of the project contributed to fostering employment and integration of childhood cancer survivors into society, education and the labour market by supporting them with a comprehensive Career Counselling Programme. At the local, regional and national level Create your Future played an important role to increasing professional qualification of adult educators in Austria, Bulgaria, Spain and Greece. The achieved impact on a national or European level was also enhanced by identifying opportunities to transfer Create your Future to 12 other European countries ( described in the Create Your Future goes Europe report), and by addressing the problematic and individual challenges which Childhood Cancer Survivor are facing after treatment to concrete stakeholders in the partner countries.The long term benefits of Create your Future will be to contributing to changing living conditions of Childhood Cancer Survivors through individual career counselling and reducing the number of unemployment rates among Childhood Cancer Survivors. Another long term benefit for Childhood Cancer Survivors will be to foster equity and their inclusion in education by creating pathways to education allowing participation of the disadvantaged group of Childhood Cancer Survivors. The long term impact of Create your Future on the economy is to contribute to reduce the hesitation of HR managers and general managers to employ Childhood Cancer Survivors. Furthermore adult educators will benefit from the professionalization by providing tailor-made in-service career counselling which enables them to work with Childhood Cancer Survivors.

The Ocean Connections project took place against a background of increasing urgency with respect to issues of climate change and completes as the COP 26 Climate Change Conference is due to take place. Young people are increasingly aware of, and concerned about climate change and other issues of environmental sustainability, yet developing their understanding of the fragile balance of the Earth’s systems remains an ongoing challenge. The project drew on expertise from a range of partners in the UK, Denmark and Spain. HEI institutions led the project activity in each country, with overall coordination by the University of Exeter, UK, who also brought expertise in creativity and environmental educational research. VIA College, Denmark brought expertise in educational research into AR and VR. CESGA’s expertise was in the design and development of digital learning tools for education. In each country, the expertise of teachers and aquarium educators in partner schools and aquaria ensured that materials developed in partnership and tested in schools were appropriate and useable by teachers and informal educators. The objectives of the project were to:•Understand the position of Ocean Literacy, creativity pedagogies and digital technology in the formal and informal curriculum in the partner countries;•Summarise the international research literacy with respect to teaching for Ocean Literacy, creative pedagogies and education using AR/VR digital technologies;•Synthesise this state of the art knowledge to develop a set of educative principles to guide teaching for Ocean Literacy using creative, digital pedagogies•Design projects for pupils to learn about Ocean Literacy, drawing on these educative principles•Evaluate these projects to understand their impact on pupils’ knowledge and attitudes and the way in which the educative principles were enacted•Draw on the educative principles and the project outcomes to develop a toolkit for teachers to use creative and digital pedagogies together to enable young people’s Ocean learning .Materials developed were piloted in schools: three pilot projects with pupils aged 9-11, and three with pupils aged 11-14. Overall, 4 aquarium educators (1 UK, 1 Denmark, 2 Spain), 10 teachers (4UK, 3 Denmark, and 3 Spain), and 235 pupils participated directly in the pilot projects (135 pupils aged 9-11; of whom 120 were from the UK and 15 from Denmark, and 117 age 11-14, of whom 101 were from Spain and 16 from Denmark).A State of the Art Review was produced, including an analysis of curricula for pupils aged 7-11 and 11-14 in each partner country related to Ocean Literacy to search for points of commonality and difference in national approaches, an exploration of where and how creative pedagogies and AR/VR digital technologies were used in practice in the partner countries, and an international literature review of research into the three project ‘strands. A unique VR tool was created for use by teachers and pupils. Using 360 images and video from aquaria and the Ocean, using this tool pupils are able to interact with, communicate, and create learning materials for themselves with respect to the Ocean. The Ocean Connections Educative Principles and the new VR tool were used by project partners in each country to design and implement six ‘pilot projects’, three for pupils aged 7-11 (Ocean Adaptations, Plastic Pollution, and Nursing Grounds for Fish) and three for pupils aged 11-14 (Biodiversity, Shoal of Fish and Accessing the Ocean). Each project was evaluated using a mixed methods, case study approach, to produce a case study report on each pilot and an overall synthesis of the findings with respect to key research questions regarding the impact on pupils’ knowledge of and attitudes towards the ocean, pupils’ and educators’ perspectives about the innovative creative and digital approaches, and the way in which the educative principles manifested in the pilot projects. Alongside these, an innovative ‘diffractive analysis’ of the data was undertaken, drawing on arts-based methods and new materialist theory to develop new insights and questions into the nature of learning in these projects. Findings show that many pupils found the use of VR with creative pedagogies engaging and impactful, but that there were some barriers in using the tool due to lack of sufficient bandwidth and, in some schools, lack of experience. Care, responsibility and activism emerged as important themes, with some key areas of connection between creative and digital pedagogies that could be usefully built upon in the design of learning experiences. The educative principles, VR tool, and pilot projects were used to create a toolkit for teachers which can be found on the Ocean Connections website. The project was disseminated via seven stakeholder and dissemination events, newspaper articles, social media, and conference presentations.

The emergence of the new coronavirus has meant a turning point, a radical change in many facets of our life and of course in the social perception of science and science communication too. During the crisis and for the first time in our era, a very large part of society really needed to rely and understand how science works and its outcomes, and they had to fight to find reliable and accurate sources of scientific information. The deafening noise of the first weeks was a sign that maybe scientist and their institutions have to communicate and listen better and that a closer relationship between science and society is still needed. In Spain, a survey carried out in April 2020 showed that healthcare professionals were the group that citizens rated most highly followed by scientists. In previous studies, such as Social Perception of Science 2018, it was already clear that the professions most highly valued by citizens were, in this order, doctors, scientists and teachers, over engineers, entrepreneurs, judges and journalists. Even so, a recent study certifies a 30% drop since 2000 in the number of enrolments in scientific and technical careers. It points out different causes for this drop and the main one seems to be the perception that it is not worth making the effort due to the imbalances in the job market. So, in this context, G-Night seeks to bring its research institutions to the whole population, to continue working and caring for a relationship that is strengthened every day. And for the first time, the main Galician centres and universities aim to do it together, reflecting the collaborative nature of science and knowledge generation. The Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit of UVIGO leads a project to bring together the 3 Galician universities, several research centres, museums, libraries and other science organizations and associations with the public to show the reality of research and science in different areas of knowledge