This Erasmus+ KA2 2016-1-ES01-KA203-025164 project, StratApp - The Art of Reading, is a European Union-funded project that aims to improve the English academic reading skills of university students through the game based application: StratApp (short for Strategies App), that is available for Android and iOS-based devices in the Play Store. The Universitat Rovira i Virgili (henceforth URV) associate professor, Mar Gutiérrez-Colón Plana, was leading the group of researchers and IT professionals in charge of developing the game-based app. Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in collaboration with 5 other European institutions, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB), Wyższa Szkoła Lingwistyczna in Częstochowa (WSLC) from Poland, Universite de Pau et des Pays de L’Adour (UPPA) from France, Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC) and Amistad IT company from Poland have created the reading app, StratApp -The Art of Reading, that combines the educational purpose of boosting students’ academic reading skills with game-design elements and game principles. The collaborative partners and members of this project created reading material and activities that enhance the main reading skills and strategies needed to attain a B2 English level. Additionally, they improved the pedagogical design of the app, the types of texts offered and the activities available in order to reach a B2 English level.It has been seen that students still encounter difficulties when dealing with academic texts. As reported in the First European Survey on Language Competences (2011), in the countries involved in this project, the percentage of secondary students having achieved at least a B1 CEFR in general English reading is the following: France 13%, Spain 24%, Poland 24%. There is clearly a need to improve this skill, taking into account that for a successful academic and professional interaction with other countries, handling academic English is a must, and the minimum level for that to be achieved is a B2 level, according to CEFR. Academic reading skills are a cross-sectional competence that enhances linguistic competence both in the foreign and in the mother tongue. In addition, StratApp-The Art of Reading, will not only help students academically in their own countries but it will also increase the employability and mobility of young people, by making them more competitive in the international job-hunting arena.The game-based application provides a thematic scenario, i.e. a museum with various works of art transformed into reading games that help you develop your academic reading skills gradually. Then, it is divided into mini-games or missions, each one designed at improving a specific aspect of academic reading skills. Completion of a certain number of missions or especially hard levels rewards collectable badges. When all missions are cleared, new scenarios are unlocked. Scenarios are organized by skill level, following the CEFR, starting with a B1 level. Completing all scenarios will imply a B2 reading academic competence. The target group of the current application is university students studying Educational Sciences, given the need to reach a B2 academic reading level at the end of their degree studies. The app has the following characteristics: It is diverse because it includes different types of games/activities to improve users' reading skills of academic B1 and B2 English texts. It is stratified, this means that when the users finish an activity (corresponding to a specific reading strategy/skills), the next one is unlocked and users can move on to the next level and activity. At the same time, users have a set of 5 games for each level (B1 and B2) and a Ticket booth placement test when they access the app, which will direct them to their appropriate level depending on the scores achieved. It is updatable, this means that the texts of the particular games can be edited using the external Content Management System (CMS) and also new material can be added. This ensures the project can develop in a long-term run, as it can get new content regularly. Initially, the application will be delivered to Educational Sciences Degree students in the 3 countries involved in the project, Spain, Poland, and France, but further up the app aims to attract users from other European countries, thus raising learners' awareness of the European Union as an entity and foster European citizenship. Although the project finalized in August 2019, the app will still be available after the end of the EU funding in order to help university students to improve their English academic reading skills while they have fun playing a mobile game.

Quickly developing, upgrading and deploying applications is the core function of the software and IT industry, often achieved through running software on shared hardware (e.g., on data centers) in order to reduce costs and improve profitability. At this point however, the software world appears stuck with inherently insecure and not-so-efficient lightweight virtualization (e.g., containers), because virtual machines are deemed too expensive to use in many scenarios. Unikernels, extremely lightweight VMs, seem like a step towards a solution, but their overwhelming development time and costs hinder their use in real-world settings. Unicore will challenge this status quo by enabling software developers to easily build and quickly deploy lightweight, secure and verifiable images (which we call unikernels) starting from existing applications. Unicore will create a common code base from which to build unikernels, and develop tools that will make the creation of such unikernels as easy as compiling an app for an existing OS, which will enable EU players to lead the next generation of cloud computing services and technology. Such tools will also allow for the creation of lean, efficient operating systems that would be perfectly suitable for resource-constrained devices settings such as IoT. Through its industry-led consortium and its top-notch academic partners, Unicore will ensure exploitation of its technical results through the implementation and operational deployment of multiple use cases. Unicore addresses the work programme’s goals by (1) providing a common code base and tools for code reusability, (2) by developing tools for verification and validation of the generated software, (3) through transparently handling of cross-platform dependencies and by (4) accelerating the full software lifecycle by fully automating several of its stages.