Our school, our playground is a project about implementing new, innovative teaching methods at school based on game learning. Games are an essential part of the lives of young children, especially nowadays, children have a strong impact on their habits, aesthetics and mentality. Trying to cope with this, modern teachers have to change their teaching methods and curricula approaches and turn school into an attractive learning space, where children can also have fun like a playground. Moreover, students with low academic achievements due to economic, social, cultural problems or disabilities. Positive attitudes towards schooling can improve learning achievements of the children, according to current educational research. Eight partner schools from eight European countries, namely Greece, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Bulgaria, Poland, Cyprus and Romania participate in this project, that targets children from 6 to 14 years old. Teachers of these schools will work together to invent educational scenarios that exploit the use of games in classroom. The scenarios will then spread throughout the school communities and be implemented by teachers who want to experiment with their students with new learning methods. The teachers that take part in this project form communities of practice that will work together trying to reflect on their teaching methods, finding the things that work or do not work in classroom and report their experience to their colleagues. Student communities will also be formed both at a regional and at an international level. Students that have a higher possibility for early school leaving will be of priority. Game learning methods can help them to fight their disengagement from the school process and give them key competencies that will help them both at school and at their working life. The results of the project will include: the web site of the project, the blog of students and a handbook that contains all the scenarios proposed, the games used and the comments of the teachers that used these games for learning purposes. We believe that this project will have a strong impact on the school communities that will participate: change the way that teachers teach and cooperate with each other, make education more inclusive for all kind of students, enhance the relationships between teachers and students through game playing methods . Moreover, the project could be also viewed as a tool for policy makers since it turns the results of the educational research on game playing methods to a small scale real life experiment that can be repeated to other schools, as well.
The idea of this project started when a group of teachers realized that school could be much more fun and much more effective if there were games involved in the teaching process. Playing is only natural for children and what the modern pedagogical theory tells us, is that games at school may serve a twofold purpose: on one hand they help children cultivate social and emotional skills like cooperation, team spirit and contesting without strongly antagonizing one another and on the other hand they can be suitably customized to support pure educational goals and parts of the curriculum. This idea was so strong between the teachers of our schools that we decided to propose for an Erasmus+ project about game playing. The two basic target groups of the project were the teachers and students of our schools. As far as the teachers were concerned, the project aimed to empower them to use games in classroom in order to find more enjoyable ways of teaching even traditional topics, make their teaching more inclusive and face disadvantaged students effectively. Regarding the students, the project aimed to help them acquire modern skills, use technology in meaningful ways, cooperate with each other and make learning more engaging for them, preventing early school leaving. The project was implemented by eight partner schools from 8 different countries, namely Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy, Romania, Spain and Poland. Some of the schools had already cooperated in previous Erasmus and Comenious projects but there were also two new partners. The schools differed in many ways: number of students (from 50 to 2000), area of living (urban vs countryside), years of experience in European projects, etc. However, they all had teachers that they were passionate to explore new possibilities in their teaching methods. The main activities undertaken, were to define a set of games to be played in classroom and to integrate these games in their teaching methods by designing suitable learning scenarios. The teachers’ communities that were formed in each school collaborated and shared these scenarios as a set of good practices. Students also cooperated both at local and transnational level and exchanged their experience of playing games in classroom (and not only). There were also dissemination events that took place in each school, like the game days where all the teacher and student community together with invited parents had to play games inside or outside their classrooms. All the scenarios created by the teachers were gathered at the end of the project in a deliverable and uploaded on the web site of the project. Because the games played at our schools exceeded the scenarios created by the teachers, there was a second deliverable documenting most of them in the form of good practices (also uploaded on the web site). It is estimated that about 150 game activities were played in our schools throughout the project. At the end of the project we performed a project evaluation for teachers and students. Before that, many of our partners had already performed local evaluations in their schools. The main events of our project were disseminated through the web page, the blog of the project and the eTwinning workspace. We also created a Facebook group, were teachers from other schools were also invited to participate and get informed about the activities of our project. In every school not only the Erasmus+ team members, but basically the larger part of the school communities, including parents were aware and supported this project. Also, at a regional level, educational and administrative authorities provided us with great help by sponsoring our events, sending representatives to our meetings and dissemination events, providing promotional material and informing the local press about our activities. Most of our teachers and students found the project satisfactory in terms of results and they declared that they would like very much to continue implementing or participating in game learning activities. Teachers from other schools have consulted us on how they could implement similar methods in their schools and take advantage of the experience that we gained throughout the project.