The SCALE project has achieved the objectives proposed in the project, developing and implementing an online training programme for the acquisition of transversal competences in the field of Smart Cities previously identified. This training programme consists of two clearly differentiated modules, the first one contains some theoretical topics that will facilitate the student the acquisition of the mentioned competences. The second module implements a project-based learning methodology (taking as a basis and example different real projects, which were previously selected), in itself, this module is innovative because it is implemented online; on the other hand, students were organised in international and interdisciplinary teams and the evaluation of the same was carried out through a video that each team had to develop. The elaboration, structuring, approach and application of the teaching methodologies in this training programme were innovative and novel, which allowed it to be published in a high impact journal. This training programme is designed for university students and recent graduates as well as for students participating in continuing education programmes. To date, two editions of this training programme have been held, with a total of almost 800 students from 25 different countries and from the three profiles mentioned above. Just under a third of the students enrolled successfully completed the programme.The student mobility programme foreseen in the project has also been successfully completed. These students have spent their internship period working on one of the selected projects (which were used in the second module of the training programme), selecting those who have obtained the best marks in the first edition of the training programme.

Students with disabilities across Europe are underrepresented in higher education and employment, while peer support has been recognised as a valuable and cherished support by students with disabilities and their educators (Murphy, 2011, 2015, Magennis, Murphy et al, 2014). Career guidance for students with disabilities by professionals who are skilled and knowledgeable about their needs is crucial to making effective transitions (NCSE, 2014). However, access to skilled career guidance professionals who have the skills required to support students with disabilities is limited (NCSE, 2014, EC, 2012). Students with sensory impairments need a more inclusive infrastructure to encourage and inspire them to make better informed career decisions. The areas of future employment such as engineering, Sciences and ICT will be particularly targeted by this project.Peer support has been shown to be very successful for people with disabilities for example in the field of technology, (see http://dice-project.eu/) Peer4Progress seeks to develop an customized online peer support and peer mentoring platform for students with sensory impairments in second and third level education. Peer supporters and peer mentors will be recruited at undergraduate, post graduate, and those graduates who are in employment; in particular, the project will recruit researchers, scientists and PhD holders with sensory impairment as mentors. The project will engage with post primary students with sensory disabilities and their educators to identify their transition needs and see how Peer4Progress can best support them. Accredited online training will be provided for peer supporters and peer mentors.An online course on the Inclusion of people with disabilities in career guidance will be developed for those professionals working in this area. This will be an accredited Continuous Personal Development course. Those who complete this course will increase their confidence as career guidance teachers to work with disabilities by increasing their knowledge of the options available to students with sensory impairment. They will gain knowledge about enabling technology, and other supports available to people with sensory impairments to allow them enjoy a career of their choice. The Career Guidance Professional is a key resource to all young people in supporting them to chart a career path including students with sensory impairments. In order to support such students the guidance professional must have a deep understanding of the impact of disability and of the negative attitudes and problems these students are faced with in making transitions to education and or work in a world that was not designed to include them. This E.Learning CPD Course for Guidance Professionals aims to give Guidance Professionals the competence and confidence to guide and advise students with disabilities in making career chooses. They will learn how to respond to a student with sensory impairments whose condition could be seen as a barrier to their chosen career, for example the deaf student who wants to be a nurse or the blind student who wants to be a journalist. The guidance professional through this course will come to understand how accommodations and assistive technology work to enable the student to take up the career path of their choice and secure employment. Similarly, they will understand the changes that are needed in the educational or employment environments to be more inclusive of students/graduates with sensory impairment. The course will be developed in collaboration with the guidance professionals and piloted in 4 partner countries. The project intends to share the learning from user requirements with the students with sensory impairment to inform the Guidance Professional course and vice versa. It will capitalise on the shared learning of professionals and students across the partner countries.The project will fully utilize the networks of students, graduates and career guidance professionals available via the partner organisations to disseminate the project outputs to at least 2000 students, volunteers, teachers and career guidance professionals via the various networks in the partner countries. The E. Learning modules are innovative and will be promoted through the partner networks . Participants will be encouraged to use social media such as twitter and face-book to promote the modules and to invite others to take part. In summary the project aims to improve access to higher education and career opportunities including professions for students with sensory impairment by up-skilling and improving the guidance infrastructure and by improving the self advocacy of students with sensory impairment through peer mentoring. The innovative online formats used in the project will enable participants to participate anywhere, any time and any place in both eLearning and or the Peer support network.

Brains for Europe Project is an initiative that comes up from the inside of the educational centres and is conceived as a solid contribution to the ongoing pedagogical renovation both thematically and methodologically. The aim of B4E is the introduction of learning in neurosciences (one of the most promising scientific areas, to which the European Commission is nowadays paying a growing attention) in educational centres, through the creation inside them of neuroscience classrooms that will open a new operative frame which we define as metaschool. Unlike top-down conventional learning, metaschool implies another type of learning, much more horizontal or even bottom-up, led by students of the different centres, in which the very students are those who decide and lead their own learning and – using the suggested tools – help to offer it to the rest of the fellow students of their own centre and to those of the other countries’ centres involved in the project. B4E has got 9 formal partners altogether: 1 foundation (and hospital), 2 companies, 5 educational centres and a mutual insurance company dedicated to education and rehabilitation in disability. Four of the partners are from Spain and the rest belongs to Turkey, Poland, Romania, France and Iceland. The countries involved are therefore 6. One has to add the involvement of 3 non-formal partners: 3 European networks such as NICE Foundation, ENVITER and HIPEN. Among the main activities of the Project, it appears in the first place a teacher training of those who will take part later in the coordination of the neuroscience classrooms (neuromentors). Once constituted a neuroscience classroom, it will be tackled in it different subjects related to the brain, to the relationship between neurosciences and technology, and to the mental disease (the question of education and rehabilitation in disability will be underlined) making the students to get opened, among other things, to the STEM Learning, to the critical thinking, to the learning to learn and to the neurological health. Students’ approach to these subjects will have an active character articulated according to the answers to concrete challenges they are going to be posed. Students will work their materials and will expose them in TED-like talks, that they will share with the rest of participants but also with the rest of the centre’s students through an e-platform. Young people taking part in the Project, among 12 and 16 years old, will get identified with it and with their role as influencers that will become an example and a motivation for the rest of their fellow students. They will be the axis around which our metaschool will spin. The idea of generating a metaschool inside a conventional educational centre, in coordination with it and profiting the channels afforded by new technologies and network communication forms provides an effective pedagogical novelty reinforced at the same time by the matter in question, decisive when it comes to inform the new pedagogical theories on the details of learning. Direct impact of B4E will be performed on 4 ambits: 1) On the directly involved students, that will take part of a different type of education, on which they have the power of decision, founded on their possibility of discovering and on their own intellectual effort, and that gets multiplied immediately through their own projection as Project-disseminators. At the same time, B4E is designed to have a great influence on students’ professional vocations, and particularly on female professional vocations. 2) On the centre’s students in general, to which it will lead to a fascinating ambit of knowledge and to which the Project will also offer a new pedagogical proposal. 3) On the centres that take part, first of all, through their teachers’ staffs, that will exercise a new and relevant pedagogical task that will contribute to offer them new possibilities and perspectives. 4) Project’s diffusion will multiply its impact at the social level, in the different countries and in the EU in general. Among its many long-term benefits, our B4E Project, including in its whole not only the urban reality but also the rural one, offers channels to take advantage of all ambits’ European youth’s talent, regardless of how limited are their opportunities in their concrete regions. That will make the difference to sound out aspects of an European collective intelligence and in the long run the Project could maybe serve as a model for future projects and make that young people can recognise themselves more easily as citizens of the same political union, the European one, reinforcing their European identity. In the end, knowing our brain is the best way of knowing ourselves and the environment we have created. Our project aims to offer the students a frame from which articulate this knowledge and set the creative bases of the very neurosciences’ evolution and of the value of its knowledge applied in the future.

Obesity is one of the main population health threats worldwide, with a sustained increase in prevalence over the last decades and a constellation of co-morbidities that seriously hamper individual wellbeing and life-expectancy. Despite major research efforts, obesity treatments have proven of limited efficacy. Thus, effective prevention strategies are essential to avoid the full spectrum of metabolic complications of overweight during the life-course. Adult obesity is rooted on early maturational events, including pathophysiological and psychological determinants occurring during the gestational, infantile and/or adolescent periods, which globally remain ill defined. Identification of such early pathogenic mechanisms and markers of metabolic disease is key for active prevention and personalized management of body weight disorders later in life. Of note, pathogenic mechanisms and susceptibility to obesity are seemingly gender-dependent, but this aspect remains underexplored and may compromise effectiveness of preventive measures and treatments tackling obesity and its complications. eprObes (for early Prevention of Obesity) is a multidisciplinary, patient-centered project, involving clinical studies targeting different maturational windows, coupled with cognitive, mental health, life-style and behavioral studies, as well as mechanistic analyses in suitable preclinical models, whose major aim is to define effective strategies for active prevention of obesity during the life-course, with particular focus on early developmental events, from prenatal (including peri-conceptional) to pubertal periods, and determinants of feeding behaviors. Multi-omics studies and integral analysis of eprObes data, assisted by bioinformatic technologies and artificial intelligence, will permit definition of tailored preventive measures and life-style interventions, at key maturational periods, to avoid excessive body weight gain and lifetime metabolic complications in both sexes.