CLIL4ALL Intensive Week: Immersive Onboarding Design Using Engaging Web Apps at Karelia University of Applied Sciences

The second CLIL4ALL Intensive Week was organized at Karelia University of Applied Sciences in Joensuu, Finland, between February 17th and 21st, 2025. It brought together 27 students and 13 teachers from five partner universities involved in the CLIL4ALL project.

The aim of the week was to form multicultural and multinational student development teams tasked with envisioning, designing, and presenting a concept for a gamified student onboarding web app, accompanied by a functional prototype. The development teams included students from Information and Communications Technology and Business Computing degree programs, who focused on the prototype development, as well as students from other programs such as Marketing, Learning and Development, Business Administration and Human Resource Management, who were more involved in ideation, design, content creation, and presentation.

English was used as the working language to facilitate communication among team members. Throughout the week, students presented their project progress through a pitch, a poster presentation, and finally at a presentation stand. Especially at the beginning of the intensive week, students were provided with introductory lectures and workshops covering various aspects of gamified web app development and intercultural communication. As the week progressed, more time was allocated for team-specific work, supported by designated coaches focusing on communication and language-related aspects. Technical coaches were also available to assist with questions and issues related to prototype development.

The intensive week lived up to its name, with the ambitious goal of completing an entire development cycle—from initial idea to a finalized concept and functional prototype—all within just one week. Teams were composed of students who, at the beginning of the week, were mostly complete strangers to one another, coming from different countries and academic backgrounds. Despite what could have been challenging circumstances, the student teams collaborated successfully, presenting innovative concepts and impressive prototypes of their gamified onboarding web apps by the end of the week.

Based on student feedback and observations throughout the week, participants appeared to enjoy the demanding yet rewarding journey. The teams found effective ways to communicate in English about the content to be created and the functionalities to be implemented. They also engaged in lively interactions outside of study hours.

All in all, the week offered an enjoyable, holistic, and intensive experience of integrating language learning with content development through a tightly packed project. The nature of the work required students to actively share ideas, negotiate common approaches, support one another, and—most importantly—move together toward a shared goal.