Inclusive education aims for equal opportunities to be provided to all children regardless of their socioeconomic background, genre, or disability. There are various technological tools that can support the inclusive education of students with complex communication needs. Despite the fact that the parents’ roles in supporting pupils with disabilities is vital, to date, there has been a lack of research investigating the roles of Cypriot parents of these children. The research aim was to explore the experiences of parents on the island who support students with complex communication needs, regarding how they perceive their roles as parents. In-depth interviews were conducted with six parents of children aged five to twelve years. Data were analysed based on thematic analysis. The findings show that parents of children with complex communication needs in Cyprus have a number of roles when it comes to supporting their children in communicating with others. They attend training sessions to acquire the necessary skills to communicate effectively with their children. They also act as communicating partners with friends, relatives and others. In addition, they act as advocates of their children both in the school, as well as in the wider community. It is vital that a number of online platforms are made openly available in order to increase knowledge and skills on issues related to AAC and inclusion. Of note is the MYHUB Inclusion Hub Platform (www.inclusion-hub.eu) which offers a one-stop-shop for inclusion practices, tools, resources and methods addressed to the pedagogical staff in formal and non-formal educational settings.

A recent report by the Social Protection Committee on the social dimension in the EU 2020 strategy, stated that greater emphasis must be put on innovating the training of human capital to be responsible for improving the quality of life for vulnerable people throughout Europe, including persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Education plays a pivotal role in this process and presents many challenges, especially with regard to the practice learning. However, arranging practice learning for students carries the challenge of finding qualified mentors/practice assessors, finding sufficient numbers of placements for all students, and addressing the risks associated with the safety and well-being of students and trainees. An innovative approach to experiencing practice learning is through simulation- and game-based education where students engage in an imitation of a real-world scenario in playful ways. An immediate advantage of interactive simulations and games is the provision of risk-free environments in cases where consequences are too costly or hazardous in real life; with a simulated practice game there are no consequences outside the boundaries of the game environment. Responding to the above challenges, the Play2Do project (http://www.play2do.eu) develops a 3D gaming environment that provides a safe and readily accessible environment where students studying to become teachers of people with intellectual disabilities can learn by interacting with non-player characters in a simulation of real world scenarios. The approach uses a more modern, constructivist approach to education and represents an example of innovative education in a digital era, particularly a computer-games era. The core constituent of the gaming/simulation environment are the real-world scenarios. In our work, we engaged special education experts from the UK, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria and Cyprus and created first a sound understanding of what exact needs are addressed by the simulation environment and second a set of six well-defined scenarios. For instance, dealing with a case in the autism spectrum, the player faces certain behaviour patterns in a simulation setting and finds his/her way through the scenes by interpreting the situation and responding appropriately. A key research finding is that gaming and virtual simulations in practice learning may be better used as a tool to give teachers a certain level of confidence and knowledge but not as a replacement of actual practice.

The Europe 2020 strategy identifies drop out from i-VET or early school leaving (ESL) as a key challenge to meeting employment targets. The Code RED project (http://www.codered-project.eu) has been developed in response to the high levels of early school leaving, drop-out and exclusion from education that often lead to unemployment, poverty and social deprivation. In taking actions towards achieving its goals, the project has been experimenting with a (serious) games' co-design methodology [1] through a dedicated co-design workshops' series, run within 2014 in the UK, Greece, Italy and Cyprus. The objective of the workshops was to engage young people in an interactive (participatory) process of designing and implementing digital educational games' prototypes, aiming at paving the way towards adopting these paradigms in the education and skills' acquisition process, thus maximising the benefit of participants. During the four organised workshops, around 30 young students and 10 trainers (including researchers and facilitators) walked through the pre-defined co-design process, trying to maintain the facilitation at the level 6 of the Hart's ladder [2]. Participants had the opportunity to work as a team, exchange experiences, share roles and responsibilities in the team, see examples of digital (educational) games/products developed by others so as to establish expectations, learn how to deconstruct the rules of games, create and discuss their own game ideas using low-tech prototyping tools (e.g. LEGO models, pack of playing cards, paper, digital means of taking notes, etc.), and finally implement prototypes of their game ideas, using game authoring software such as "Stencyl" (http://www.stencyl.com) and ARIS (https://arisgames.org/). The experimenting offered the opportunity to researchers to collect some very interesting observations, analyse them across the four involved countries and extract useful knowledge towards expanding already available education and employability curriculums from previous projects (e.g. the GOET project, http://goet-project.eu/). References: [1] Bates, M., Brown, D., Cranton, W. and Lewis, J. (2010). Facilitating a games design project with children: a comparison of approaches. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Games-Based Learning (ECGBL), October 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp.429-437. [2] Hart, R. (1992). Children's participation: from tokenism to citizenship. Florence: UNICEF International Child Development Centre