During 2020 we are experiencing a global pandemic with important consequences at the public health level, but also with a high impact on the lives of citizens. Lockdowns were (and are) the rule in many European countries, and restrictive measures, including for mobility, affect millions of people. Within this context, the crisis also generates uncertainty, since today we do not know when or how we will overcome this pandemic situation. Also, when we do, many things will have changed forever. Young Europeans are perhaps being the least seriously affected by the disease, however, they experience to a great extent its consequences: unemployment, substantial changes in their education, alteration of their socialization and leisure habits, to name a few of them. All this is a challenge for their ability to cope with change, and they will need to develop their flexibility, adaptability, problem solving and creativity skills. Also during this period, access to the internet and the consumption of digital culture has multiplied exponentially, and even in many countries the most creative side of people has emerged, generating improvised artistic expressions from balconies, or created at home and shared on through social networks. However, when we talk about the digital world, we see that there are still very low percentages of young people who generate their own content. The vast majority have a more passive and culture-consuming attitude than digital proactive and creative ones. Thus, creativity and digital culture, key elements for economic and social development, and especially essential for young people active citizenship and employability, go hand in hand in this project. NNC-New Normal Channel is a project that focuses on promoting the development of skills and competencies for creativity and culture among young people, developing an innovative educational experience that, through a challenge-based simulation game, will offer an interactive, motivating and empowering environment. The NNC Experience is the main output, through which, young people will move to the year 2030 and, as applicants as collaborators for an online media (NNC-New Normal Channel), they will have to prove their worth and show their skills and competences, performing a series of challenges and tasks, all related to the digital world and culture. The main target group of the NNC project will be the youth, and specially young people in risk of (digital) exclusion. But also, youth workers and other agents directly addressing young people social and labor inclusion and education will find in the NNC Experience (O1) a useful resource easily transferable to their initiatives and educational programs. Thus, they are also addressed targets and actively involved in the project activities. The NNC-New Normal Channel project expects that through their participation in the experience, young people will be able to: - Develop their imagination and anticipate scenarios for a future world affected by the COVID-19 impact, improving and putting their creativity into practice. - Become agents that generate content and digital culture, become active citizens, turning their ideas and opinions into voice. - Understand digital culture and consume it from a critical perspective, understanding what misinformation, misinformation, and fake news mean. - Understand how reality is transformed, improving their adaptability and flexibility skills. - Acquire technical knowledge related to digital culture that will improve their capacities and employability. - Develop their entrepreneurial and intrapreneurship competences, taking initiatives and being proactive. The transnationality brings together organizations with complementary knowledge and expertise in the field of digital culture, creativity, and youth work to achieve European-wide reach and impact through the large networks of project partners, addressing common European goals, as those stated by the Youth Goals 2019-2027 (#8, Quality Learning; #3, Inclusive Societies; and #4, Information & Constructive Dialogue)
The NNC experience has been designed to contribute to the development of competences and skills of young people in the field of digital culture and creativity through the development of an innovative educational experience that, through a non-formal training environment based on a training scenario in the form of a simulation game based on challenges (a digital news portal), offers an interactive, motivating and empowering environment of basic skills for the promotion of citizenship, employability and transition to adulthood such as creativity, critical thinking, flexibility and adaptability, problem-solving, communication. as well as key technical skills such as script writing, video recording, composition and artistic expression, social media management. Design a learning experience that gives young people a voice on issues relevant to their development such as discrimination, inclusion, hate speech in the media, the digital divide, global warming, etc, equipping young people with the competences to become critical thinkers and active agents in the European constructive dialogue.
The new habits resulting from periods of lockdowns have led to a change in behaviour that has been particularly visible in the consumption of digital culture. The consumption of digital culture has soared among all age groups of young people, but this has not been matched by an increase in content creation, illustrating a situation where young people are more passive than consumers of digital culture and content creation. Digital culture is a key space for expression and participation for young people, hence no one can be left behind as a result of a skills deficit in both technical skills and content. NNC is a gamified experiential learning experience, in response to the need to empower the younger generations to become active agents of digital culture, promoting the development of skills for creativity and content generation