Abstract:

The Austrian Special Olympics National Games are a biennial multisport event series and brings intellectual disabled people into the focus of the public. Assistance comes from regional located pupils and young students, who work as volunteers or service staff and bring in their experiences and knowledge. During the last event in June 2022 a group of ICT (information and communication technology) students of the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences were responsible for providing the computer network connections and the time keeping tasks of the bicycle race competitions. Additionally, the tasks about multimedia entertainment like video camera recording, stage editing and directing, web streaming and featuring the video wall have to be performed by these young crew members, too. All the preparations were done partly in advance during different project lectures and partly immediately during the setup phase of the sport event.

This paper shows the effort and degree of difficulty how pupils and students can work together in the field of ICT and multimedia entertainment for big sport events and to provide them how inclusion of disabled people works. It is also a big challenge for the professor to train the students as supervisor for the pupils and to react flexible according the pending tasks and the available knowledge. Both, student and professor must have good experiences in co-operating together during a tight time schedule. The aim is to strengthen the skills of the pupils for tasks, which can be learned directly by guidance of young students. The small age gap between students and pupils and the sport venue as an exceptional place for teaching of ICT and multimedia topics gives another view about teaching and learning. Finally, improving social skills also for empathic collaboration, successful teamwork and sensitivity about time management is another positive outcome of this education method.

Keywords:

Sport Events, Multimedia, Volunteers, Special Olympics, Pupil-Student Collaboration.