Announcing the winners of #reinventingBeethoven - an educational challenge

In October, the Europeana Education Community launched #reinventingBeethoven, a creative educational challenge for students in primary and secondary education. Today we look at how the challenge encouraged students to engage with Beethoven’s life and work, and, on the 250th anniversary of his birthday, announce the winners!

About the challenge

250 years ago, on 16 December 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany. Cultural heritage institutions around Europe have organised concerts, exhibitions, talks and the #Beethoven250 event to celebrate the anniversary, and the Europeana Education community was eager to join! In October, we launched #reinventingBeethoven, a creative, educational challenge for students in primary and secondary schools.

The challenge aimed to encourage students’ creativity with cultural heritage resources from the Europeana website and to introduce music as a powerful educational tool in the classroom for all subjects. We invited teachers to introduce Beethoven’s life and work to students and coordinate the creation of an artwork, with prizes for the most popular pieces. We suggested that they use the Europena website, editorials and educational resources for inspiration, and explore the collections of other relevant museums.

Engaging students and teachers

Engaging young learners with cultural heritage resources can be a fantastic way for them to explore historical and diverse topics, but we understand that teachers are sometimes limited on the time they can dedicate to these. For the #reinventingBeethoven challenge, Europeana Education tried to make participating as easy as possibly by producing resources, content and guidelines for teachers to use.

We published content on the Europeana website to engage young audiences in the challenges, including a new gallery called 'Life and works of Beethoven' and two blog posts 'Beethoven's Ode to Joy: a cultural kaleidoscope' and 'Geniuses and their (dis)abilities'. These covered two key topics related to the challenge, and a Historiana’s source collection encouraged students to learn more about the socio-historical context around Beethoven’s life and work.

Entries and voting

The competition ran from 26 October until 3 December, and we were delighted to see 28 groups of students from 11 countries around the world take part. On 10 December, we invited our online followers and jury (composed of (Altheo Valentini, Co-Chair of the Europeana Education community; Giuseppe Mossuti, Project Manager at European Schoolnet; and Lorraine Besnier, Junior Project Manager at EuroClio) to vote on 13 of these artworks to select two winners.

Voting took place via the tool Padlet, and the call for votes was published on Europeana Education Facebook Group, where it was enthusiastically shared by members. In total 12,716 votes were collected!

The winners

The #reinventingBeethoven Jury Award goes to the Happy Birthday Beethoven project created by 11-14 year-old students, coordinated by Elisabetta Nanni from the IC Rovereto Nord (Rovereto, Italy). The project created an interactive exhibition around Beethoven’s life and work and an escape room in Beethoven’s Bonn house.

The #reinventingBeethoven Audience Special Award goes to Gülser Önal, a teacher from the Şehit Semih Özcan Secondary School in Turkey for the project 'Beethoven's Great Success' with 11-12 year-old students. This project was also coordinated by the ELT teacher, Melike Hanoğlu.

The other finalist projects voted by the general audience and jury included:

A video created by 14-15 year-old students coordinated by Theodora Gkeniou from the Pentapolis Upper High School which explains Beethoven’s life and work.

Mission Ludwig, created by 11-12 year-old students and coordinated by Joaquín Alberto Pagador Becerra from the CEIP Juan XXIII in Zafra (Spain) and assisted by Veronica Gayango Mena, Angel Manuel Correa Cabezas, and Silverio Olmedo Alonso, teachers from the same school. Students created an educational adventure on a timeline with videos for users to uncover a mystery around an episode of Beethoven’s life.

Zoom with Beethoven, created by 12-13 year-old students and coordinated by Lamia Büşra Yeşil and Özge İnce from the eTwinning Project Bag of Tricks. In this project, students imagined asking questions of an animated image of Beethoven in a Zoom session.

An interactive project around Beethoven created by 12-13 year-old students and coordinated by Francesca Paola Zaza d’Aulisio and Giovanna Luiso from the IC Leonardo Da Vinci- Lorenzini in Caserta (Italy) and assisted by Teresita Gravina. Students recorded videos linked to a sheet music image with creative interpretations from the Ode to Joy and Beethoven’s life.

The winner selected by the jury receives the chance to write a Learning Scenario for Europeana Education, which will be promoted on social media and entered into our 2021 Europeana Education learning scenarios competition, and the winner of the audience voting receives a special certificate. All finalists receive a certificate to note their achievement, and the ideas behind the most innovative and original proposals will be published in a Europeana Pro post in February.

If you would like to get involved in more initiatives like #reinventingBeethoven, join the Europeana Education community.