The continuous growth of the worlds civilization and the permanent movement of people into big cities, does not only enhance waste and pollution, but increases the need for resources. Because the non renewable resources will be depleted in a foreseeable time and renewable resources still could not cover the requirements, it is assumed by experts, that a linear economy is no concept for the future. Unfortunately new concepts are not approved, need enterprising entrepreneurship and take time to be economic, so the change in thinking proceeds very slowly.

This project, coordinated between vocational and secondary schools from Great Britain, Italy, Greece, Finland and Germany, intends to sensitize the participating students for the benefits and perspectives of circular economy to educate them as multiplicators.

To reach these aims the students acquire knowledge about the concepts, problems and best

practice of circular economy in the first half of the project. They analyse their school and hometown with this input and integrate their families and citizens by doing questionnaires and public relations.

They document these tasks, visit companies, produce videos about the lifecycle of products and design quizzes or digital lessons as input for other interested classes to get into touch with the problem and do explanatory work.

By this the students and involved teachers also improve their competences with ICT, digital learning methods and digital tools to design them. An international project homepage will be designed and hosted by the students to spread the project results.

On the second half of the project, the students change their perspective from customers and citizens to entrepreneurs. Based on their experiences and new knowledge also in scientific fields, they develop ideas for start-ups and design their business plans. Because of the massive financial requirements and the problems of start-ups or companies dealing with new resources or ecological ideas to find investors or generate capital, the students have to investigate and analyse other possibilities.

They figure out the aspects and the possible ways of crowdfunding and simulate it for their start-up.

The simulation is organised by the use of a public internet portal and by the integration of other public users like the students’ parents, friends and other students at school. They have the possibility to donate play money to support the best ideas and learn a lot of modern investment, made possible by the reasonable use of ICT.

By this and the documentation of these processes it is not only intended to integrate more people into the project and spread the ideas, but it is also aimed to depict this knowledge and experience on the project-homepage to popularise this possibility. This elaborated economical and ecological knowledge accompanied with competences to use ICT in a creative and useful way is the intended main impact on students and teachers. Both groups will be sensitized in order to modify their own consumer attitude to be multiplicators, invent new ideas in the private and school surrounding and to

use the new competences to improve their skills.

 

The results (digital lessons, quizzes, videos, presentations, simulations) made public on the homepage should influence other schools and teachers to pay attention to the benefits of circular economy and to integrate it into teaching activities. This process will be supported by public relations activities of the project partners including public activities in the hometowns, reports in local newspapers and radio. This also provides a lot of publicity for the participating schools to support their image as “European schools” and motivates the students and teachers. Their continuous communication with each other using the project-language English on different communications portals like WhatsApp, eTwinning, google-drive and e-mail improves their intercultural competences and solidifies the partnership between the schools, so that projects in the future will follow up.