The transnational youth initiative Critical Escape: educational escape rooms for young people is developed and led by young people and organizations from Estonia & Sweden during the period of 01.08.2018 to 31.12.2019 and engages young people to design and create educational escape rooms that will be accessible for young people with fewer opportunities in the regions/countries where the youth initiative takes place. Project aim: The youth initiative aims to empower young people from various backgrounds to develop critical thinking and raise the level of their involvement in the community life through participating in educational escape rooms created and implemented by young people. Objectives we want to reach at the community level: - To create cooperation bonds between initiating organizations and local communities in our regions/countries; - To promote active involvement in the community life of young people with fewer opportunity background; - To empower youth groups and young people by giving them an opportunity to participate in escape room activities; - To promote critical thinking and protective factors preventing destructive behavior through making events in and with the local community; Objectives targeting the young people creating the TYI and joining it: - To learn about escape room development concepts through cooperation with escape room companies; - To foster creativity and entrepreneurial attitude in young people with fewer opportunity background; - To design a set of portable escape room concepts and test them in urban and rural areas with local young people; - To experience a full cycle of idea to action through creating, promoting and implementing a youth initiative; The youth initiative foresees at least 400 young people taking part in educational escape rooms and them being implemented in various youth centers, schools, social centers and municipalities. The project outputs and project results will ensure the sustainability of the outcomes by the following indicators. During the period of the transnational youth initiative project implementors and organizations will find partners for further sustaining the initiative like more organizations would be interested to host escape games. Hopefully local stakeholders will have interest in investing in the ideas to be developed further with more materials being acquired and more complex portable rooms being built. We envision that we will also build up a sustainable target audience with the desire to invite us on their events and provide our escape room concepts. Since the initiative is meant to be noticed and promoted we envision a set of sponsors interested to support the sustainability of the activity. As a possibility we envision establishing relations with our partners from escape room companies that can establish stronger cooperation bonds with our team and make us part of the services they promote. The team will gain experience and be more competent to proceed with the initiative at a higher level and with more ideas and confidence. With this knowledge and experience they might become employed by a company from the field or start their own enterprise and proceed with promoting the outcomes.
The transnational youth initiative Critical Escape: educational escape rooms for young people was developed and led by young people and organizations from Estonia & Sweden during the period of 01.08.2018 to 31.12.2019 and engaged young people to design and create educational escape rooms that were accessible for young people with fewer opportunities in the regions/countries where the youth initiative takes place. The project aim was to empower young people from various backgrounds to develop critical thinking and raise the level of their involvement in community life through participating in educational escape rooms created and implemented by young people. During the project, 15 young people from Estonia and 10 people from Sweden created 5 portable educational escape rooms on topics of mental health, diabetes, tobacco use, communication and drugs addiction among youngsters in Estonia which were implemented in different schools, youth centers, public events in Estonia and Sweden and reached up to 350 people. The coordinating team of the project consisted of 5 people (Anna 28, Anna 23, Jegor 28, Maria 26, and Julia 18) - active members of the NGO Shokkin Group. The group of creators was gathered after the open introduction event and via online call and consisted of 15 young people from 14 to 30 years old. The main target group was youngsters from different areas of Estonia and Sweden. As a tangible result of the project, participants created toolboxes for each room, which are available for everyone online on a website of Shokkin Group Estonia (et.shokkin.org) and shared in social media of partners and personal social media of participants and 5 physical portable escape rooms. During the long-term youth initiative participants met with social worker and discussed different social problems, that are relevant for young people in our areas, visited escape room companies and met with escape-room game masters to learn about escape-room development, participated in public events, open test-events, had training and workshops on learning design, had brainstorm meetings, also visited tobacco prevention organization, organization working with mental health and NGO working with NEETs.