Digital blessing for Maturants: Candlaca campaign starts on May 7th!

Digital blessing for Maturants: Candlaca campaign starts on May 7th!

Basel-Stadt, Schweiz - Around 40,000 students at AHS and BHS are preparing for their high school exams, which will start on May 7, 2023. In this context, the "Be Blessed!" Instead of getting the Maturanten the opportunity to get digitally encouragement and blessing. Registration for the campaign is free and takes place via the website www.beblessed.at. On the exam days, all registered candles are lit and prayers are spoken to give them additional support.

registered also received video blessing requests via WhatsApp on the morning of the exam day, which are transmitted by bishops and other religious personalities. This initiative will be carried out in Austria for the fourth time and enjoyed great popularity with over 2,000 participants in the previous year, which corresponds to about 5% of the Maturants. As part of the campaign, most of the registrations for mathematics, followed by German and English.

Initiative for young people

"Be blessed!" is part of the youth initiative "Think new", a joint project by Catholic and Evangelical Church Austria, which aims to get in touch with 18- to 25-year-olds. Further projects of the initiative include festival pastoral care and cafe bikes in various regions that aim to offer young people a platform and support them in their challenges.

Digital future of exams in Basel

Education director Conradin Cramer describes this changeover as a "paradigm shift" in digital education. The digital exams are supposed to make cheating more difficult, supported by a special Safe Exam browser, which prevents spitting on the Internet. Teacher Nicolas Hunkeler at the Münsterplatz-Gymnasium already demonstrated a sample examination in which a newspaper article had to be analyzed.

exams in change

Despite the digital changes, the source texts in the digital test system are provided, but remain available to enable the students to enable the students to have handwritten notes. Of 41 final classes, 27 have already approved the pilot project; However, not all exams are carried out in digital form. So far, the educational department has not expressed any security concerns regarding possible hacker attacks on the examination platforms.

While Austria's graduates immerse themselves in a new form of digital encouragement, Basel is about to have a comprehensive digital transformation of the Matura tests, which could change the educational landscape of both countries.