Tycon (2018-2020) Erasmus+ Program

Designation: TYCO(O)NSTRUCTOR. Mini-Games that Foster Entrepreneurial Competence for the Construction Sector.

Project: Belonging to the European Union Erasmus+ Program, 2018 Call, of the Key Action 2 to the Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices.

Project Identification: 2018-1-NL01-KA202-038926.

Duration: 24 months, since October 2018, until September 2020. Extended until 31st January 2021!

Budget: 280.668 €.

Coordinator of the project: Open Universiteit (Nederland).

Partners: Fundación Laboral de la Construcción (Spain), Bildungszentren des Baugewerbes e.V. -BZB- (Germany), Centro Edile Andrea Palladio (Italy), Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Slovenia (Slovenia), Westdeutcher Handwerkskammertag -WHKT- (Germany), Coventry University (United Kingdom).

Website: tycon-project.eu/

Tycon or Tyco(O)nstructor project goals, through mini-games, to develop entrepreneurial skills in the construction sector, which are necessary to foster innovative and entrepreneurial workforce to responds to the needs of the labour market, improving the quality and efficiency of education and training, enhancing creativity and innovation, including entrepreneurship, at all levels of education and training. This requires more and more creative solutions for complex problems and also more young motivated people who are able and willing to become entrepreneur.

Mini-Games that Foster enterpreneurial skills for the construction sector

The need of this project is derived from existing vocational education and training (VET) materials that fail to connect learning with real works in a motivating and effective way. From this way, conventional didactic approaches (common in much of the VET sector) are less effective for the learning of future construction entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, the most effective approaches to develop entrepreneurship skills need to include more experiential and task-oriented learning from real business problems and contexts.

Therefore, in order to improve qualification and mobility within the European framework (as a transversal skill of the project) we propose the development of serious games as didactic tools for the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills on the move for ever changing professions in a more complex society and an industry in full digital transformation. These learning benefits are enabled by the highly experiential, immersive, just-in time and contextual nature of realistic gameplay based on well-thought out learning scenarios in virtual workplaces.

The game consists of mini-games (episodes or modules) focusing on specific issues of being an entrepreneur, like:

• What is an entrepreneurial mind-set.
• How to build a reliable reputation.
• Recognize opportunities and chances.
• What are the steps in setting up your enterprise.
• How to deal with unexpected situations and outcomes.
• How to deal with failure.

The virtual environment for gameplay is workplace-based. The learner/player plays as an entrepreneur that has to deal with the various aspects (challenges and problems) of entrepreneurship in an experiential and immersive way, like developing and pitching a business plan, applying for a project bid or dealing with managing their workers, with the final aim of being qualify as a construction business tycoon. Progress on key skills towards will be monitored by ingame indicators.

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.