BACKGROUND Snail farming (Heliculture) has attracted much interest due to its alleged profitability, rapid return on investment and low capital required for an initial investment. For these reasons, Heliculture is recommended for farmers without substantial capital, low-skilled, unemployed and those aspiring to augment their income. As such, snail farming is a potentially profitable business and ideal for low-skilled adults from rural areas. However, today, snail farming in several EU countries, including Greece, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain, fails and snail farmers are forced to quit snail breeding. One of the reasons is snail diseases. The problems faced by traditional methods of snail farming also include hatching the Snail eggs, formulation of the best feed for snails at whatever stage of growth, the best care and management practices to reduce the mortality rate to Zero levels. OBJECTIVES Development of a heliculture training game for low-skilled adults and support for the setup cooperatives in rural areas by low skilled adults who have been trained on SnailVille. The main objective is to provide a training game serving as a single information point guiding a potential snail farmer on how to start a profitable business depending on his/her situation (financial capability, educational background, geographical location, etc.) by minimising the risks associated with traditional snail farming (snail diseases, egg hatching, formulation of the best feed, mortality rate). Also, contribute to the preservation of the snail population in the wild by promoting heliculture. PARTICIPANTS The partnership comprises an educational games developer, an agricultural university with expertise in heliculture, adult training organisations targeting rural areas, a finance and business development association and a technical consultancy researching on personalised training environments and with a proven track record of mainstreaming result of E&T projects. ACTIVITIES - Elaboration of a training methodology for adults from rural areas - Development of a training curriculum addressing sustainable snail farming - Iterative design and development of a training game - Validation of the outputs through a series of workshops providing feedback to be integrated in each subsequent iteration until the completion of the project following a pilot period. METHODOLOGY - Validation of the perceived training needs of low-skilled adults - Elaboration of a training methodology using a game - Development of training and assessment material covering sustainable heliculture - Creation of a game concept for training on snail farming, including the design of a gamification schema and the definition of characters and their attributes, the conceptualisation of the game screens and a description of the gameplay - Re-purposing of the training material to knowledge content to be delivered through the game - Development of the game in 3 iterations - Set up and support of a community of SnaillVille enthusiasts, snail farming practitioners, trainers, etc. to serve as the single information point guiding a potential snail farmer on how to start depending on his/her unique situation - Promotion of the SnailVille Academy and the pilot training activities through multiplier events in order to recruit pilot participants - Validation of the game through pilot activities - A conference titled "Heliculture: Turning Challenge into Opportunity" The methodology is iterative meaning that feedback from each iteration drives work of the next iteration. RESULTS - Sustainable Snail Farming training content and Trainer's Guide on how to administer the training and the game - SnailVille Game - SnailVille Academy IMPACT - Increase in the number of successful heliculture businesses especially in rural areas - Prevention of the endangerment of snails in areas where snails are captured in the wild through the promotion of snail farming - Improvement in the quality, efficiency and quantity of snail breeding in the countries involved and a subsequent boost of the international trade of snails in Europe - Reinforcement of key competencies among adults from rural areas, such as digital competence, bridging the worlds of education and work LONG TERM BENEFITS At long term and through the development of the SnailVille Academy (dedicated virtual space) the project proposes to move towards a standard-based approach that will bring coordination, consistency and coherence to the improvement of adult training on issues which are important for a functional rural society. Such a process will allow all stakeholders to move in the same direction, with the assurance that the steps they take for improving adult training will be supported by policies and practices. By achieving its objectives the project will contribute to the fight against digital exclusion, improve quality of life, social participation and cohesion but also grow.
The objectives of this project are in line with the needs that it has been attempting to address, which are in turn enumerated in the above response. The Snailville project hopes in the long term to improve the awareness and viability of snail farming as a potential business by identifying the specific key barriers to growth of the industry and individual businesses within it and offer practical solutions to these. In the shorter term, the means by which the Snailville consortium aimed to achieve these objectives was through a serious game that the consortium would design and develop. As such, it could also be said that this was an objective in itself, to develop a course and serious game through which this course could be delivered in a way that is not just educational, but also innovative, engaging, and informative.
Although little-practiced and quite obscure relative to other forms of agriculture, snail farming (also known as heliculture) is a form of farming that in theory bears a lot of promise as a modern business model. It requires relatively little space, start-up resources, or agricultural expertise, and so can be undertaken flexible on a comparatively small scale to start before being scaled up to meet commercial requirements as desired. The broad issues identified as barriers to snail farming at the inception of this projects were therefore twofold: first, that awareness of snail farming as a potential business activity in Europe is generally very low. Secondly, in practice, many incipient heliculture businesses fail because of a lack of relevant skills or expertise. If these needs were met, it is therefore much more likely that heliculture could become a viable, simple, and flexible business opportunity for many, particularly in rural areas. The central driving force behind this project therefore was to promote heliculture as a potential hobby or even business and in particular the skills necessary for this through the use of a serious game.