In the world of youth education, the opportunities deriving from the digital world are many, also the European Commission encourages the use of highly innovative tools in training and activities to be carried out with young people. Likewise, contemporary societies of the most economically advanced countries seem to invest more attention in the learning processes driven by the complexity of everyday life, new technologies and above all transformations of society that mark everyone's life-long learning process. This expression denotes the need to foresee educational and training paths throughout one's life, which deviate from the canonical formal examples of education, providing more attractive and effective educational tools, in order to guarantee an educational approach that leads to social inclusion of those who live in situations of fewer opportunities, specifically in conditions of disability. Spread the Game wants to analyze good practices, methods, digital and non-digital tools and examples that can be used by non-profit organizations, educators and youth workers making their work and partnership network more engaging and effective, especially in relation to the involvement of young people with physical or mental challenges. The project aims to provide educators, operators, and teachers with tools in order to apply and use best practices, free digital resources available on the Internet that are identified and analyzed in daily activities with youngsters experiencing physical or mental challenges. The exchange of good practices offers the possibility to explore and investigate innovative teaching methods, useful for the promotion of an active - inclusive and collaborative methodology. Although approaches and methodologies for the success of young people with disabilities or special educational needs are more taken into consideration in areas of formal education (school), traditional non-formal education systems do not fully satisfy the involvement of young people, especially the young with disabilities, revealing a worrying disparity between the current forms of involvement and learning. The methodologies incorporating digital and game design, such as the Gamification technique and / or Digital Storytelling, incorporate an element of innovation and proved to be extremely valid for enhancing transversal learning and able to maintain the attention of learners by increasing the acquisition of skills. It is crucial to encourage operators and educators to open up new ways of using non-formal tools that incorporate technology. The target group of the project is the operators, educators, and staff of the organizations that work in close contact with the young people with disabilities and not, and the disabled youngsters (specifically the bearers of physical disability). The project includes three training activities involving forty-eight staff members, educators, youth workers and operators. During these trainings the participants will learn the method of Gamification, of Digital Storytelling and will be able to create a plan of activities for young people with fewer opportunities. They will analyze the best practices selected in the partner countries and will understand the potential for application in local contexts, promoting positive examples and increasing staff skills. In addition, the forth training will be a time of high-quality training for youth workers who will receive feedback from all participants, and an exchange, enrichment and mobility experience for eight disabled youngsters. At the end of the project, a booklet containing the analysis of the selected good practices and a tool- kit containing the guidelines for the development of an educational activity plan will be produced. The booklet and the toolkit will be promoted through dedicated web channels, conferences involving the interested parties, schools, municipality, and relevant bodies. In this way, we aim to reach a wide audience and spread new useful tools for their daily work. On the basis of the technological evolution that has affected our society, we believe that the dissemination and learning of good practices regarding social inclusion through gamification could be crucial.
Spread the Game achieved several objectives. The entire project aimed to improve the quality of the work performed by youth workers, while improving the quality standards of the activities proposed by the workers within the local and international context. Achieved goals: foster the social inclusion of youth with disabilities and fewer opportunities in different educational context; address the need to make educational tools more attractive and inclusive in formal and non-formal educational contexts; use highly innovative tools to be carried out with young people; analyze the different contexts of the organizations involved and identify four good practices per country; increase the competencies of Youth Workers involved in the project; increase the skills of the organizations involved and related networking; increase the knowledge of operators in the area of non formal education for working with youth with disabilities through the implementation of the methodologies assimilated during the project; consolidate a local, regional and international network in the field of non-formal education for youth with fewer opportunities; develop a dissemination strategy for the project results, to make the results usable to the target group.
Creating fertile ground for the conception of the Spread the Game project was the increasingly fundamental role that digital technologies have taken on in recent years in educational context. Technology turns out to be of central importance today, which has made it necessary to make educational tools more attractive, effective and inclusive in working with young people. The digital world offers valuable opportunities in order to intervene and reduce the discrepancy between the skills required in the labor market and those acquired in academic paths. This goes hand in hand with the ever-increasing importance of digital skills development, itself also considered a key element in the framework of learning and skills. Spread the Game was therefore conceived in this context, with the desire to analyze good practices, methods, digital and non-digital tools and examples that can be used in the world of nonprofit organizations, educators and youth workers to make the work of them and the partnership network more engaging and effective. The need behind the project idea lies in the fact that traditional nonformal educational systems today are not very functional in engaging young people, especially young people with disabilities.