The EduPARK project has won the prestigious European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU) Award for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. Lúcia Pombo, the EduPARK coordinator, and Margarida M. Marques, a research fellow working on the project, both from the CIDTFF Research Centre for Didactics and Technology in Teacher Education, received the prize at a special ceremony held at Hamburg University of Technology on the occasion of the ECIU Board Meeting.

In May of this year, EduPARK was selected by the Rectorate of the University of Aveiro to represent the institution in the Team Award competition.

After analyzing all the applications, the selection committee based its decision to award the prize to EduPARK on a number of aspects:

1. The team is composed of specialists form different academic fields who worked together in a multi-disciplinary setting;
2. The integration of Augmented Reality in a day-to-day technology, like the smartphone, was considered to be very innovative;
3. The project is a good example of how an everyday object can be used as an educational tool.
4. The project is an excellent example of what the ECIU is all about: challenging conventional thinking in education.

This prize has the purpose of promoting, celebrating and disseminating innovative projects in teaching and learning developed by inter-disciplinary groups. It is an initiative of the ECIU members, who share a commitment towards high quality educational practice and who seek to give visibility to exemplary, innovative pedagogical practice. The EduPARK project (Mobile Learning, Augmented Reality and Geocaching in Science Education), which involves 15 UA researchers from the three main fields of education, biology and computer science, offers original and attractive inter-disciplinary learning strategies that bring together educational practice and mobile devices in green spaces in Aveiro city park.

The team created an interactive application with augmented reality that includes four educational games, three of which are dedicated to teaching levels from primary school teaching to higher education plus one for tourists (in Portuguese and English). As well as using games, there is the possibility to use the application freely, simply using the content in augmented reality.

The project is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) within the context of COMPETE 2020.

The application is available for download on Google PlayStore and is free of charge for Android.‍