ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO STATALE B. LORENZI FUMANE VR

Their core work

Operating under the brand "Polo Europeo della Conoscenza" (European Pole of Knowledge), this is a public school network based in Fumane, Verona (Italy) that serves as a real-world testing ground for educational technology innovations. They bring classrooms, teachers, and students into EU research projects, providing the practical validation environment that technology developers need. Their contribution is the end-user perspective: how digital learning tools, serious games, and adaptive platforms actually perform with real learners in formal education settings.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their earliest projects (2015-2016) were squarely in educational technology — serious games for social inclusion and adaptive learning platforms for diverse education contexts. By 2018, they branched into health and nutrition with the PROTEIN project, suggesting a broadening of their role from ed-tech pilot site to a general-purpose school testbed for citizen-facing innovations. The shift signals growing confidence in applying their user-validation capabilities beyond digital learning tools.

Moving from pure ed-tech validation toward broader citizen engagement topics (health, nutrition, wellbeing), positioning themselves as a school-based living lab for any innovation requiring real-world user testing with young populations.

How they like to work

Exclusively a participant — they have never coordinated a project, which is consistent with their role as an end-user validation partner rather than a research leader. They work in large consortia (48 unique partners across 16 countries from just 3 projects), indicating they join ambitious, multi-partner Innovation Actions. This makes them a low-risk, high-value addition to any consortium needing a real classroom environment for piloting.

Despite only 3 projects, they have built a surprisingly wide network of 48 partners across 16 countries, reflecting their participation in large Innovation Action consortia. No single geographic concentration — their partnerships span across Europe.

What sets them apart

Their distinctive value is being a public school network — not a university, not a research lab — that has proven experience participating in EU-funded Innovation Actions. For any consortium that needs to pilot educational tools, health promotion apps, or citizen-facing digital platforms with real students and teachers in an Italian school setting, they offer something most research partners cannot: genuine end-user access and classroom reality.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MATHISIS
  Largest funding (EUR 205,625) and most technically ambitious — developed adaptive learning graphs combining formal, informal, and non-formal education with game-based methods.
• PROTEIN
  Represents a strategic pivot from ed-tech to health/nutrition, showing the school network's versatility as a pilot site beyond its traditional domain.