All Aboard: One Year of Accessible and Inclusive Remote School Trips

The rapid spread of the CoViD-19 pandemic in early 2020 and the adoption of social distancing and “stay-at-home” orders gave rise to the sudden need for schools to be able to provide effective remote teaching. In Italy and elsewhere, the introduction of distance learning technologies has significantly impacted the education of students and limited their social interaction and activities, among which are school trips and other scholastic experiences. To support the constrained educational possibilities of Italian schools, we developed “ActiveViewer”, a technological platform that enables massive and interactive remote events, and performed a year-long large-scale experiment, providing a series of massive remote school trips to several Italian cities. We designed a new school trip format, named “CodyTrip” that merges coding and computational thinking with elements of traditional school outings, and provides an engaging experience for participants. In this paper, we present the format and five online trips performed during the school year 2020/2021. The results based on user feedback support the adoption of the tool not only as a stopgap measure for school outings throughout the pandemic but as an accessible and inclusive tool to widen the possibilities of cultural tourism.