The project Growth and Access for Millennials of Erasmus+ (GAME+) is 24 months Strategic Partnership Innovation project in the filed of youth, focusing on Youth workers' capacity building throughout involving new digital tool. The partnership operates in a European context where countries involved noticed the need of digital inclusion and involving new digital methods. This project will be focused on providing support to the youth workers and organizations when they are preparing their regular activities and to support the digital participation and online learning of young people.The transnational partnership moves from a common grass-root background and agreed on the main objective of empowering and strengthening each partner methodology and digital competences of their youth workers for tackling common vulnerable target groups with effective reach-out activities based on creative approaches based on NFE: learning by doing. Specific objectives: -To offer new, innovative digital tool-educational game based on gamification method; -Improve the digital participation and digital inclusion of young people; -To encourage and motivate young people to use the educational games as a tool for online learning; -To straight the capacities of the youth workers, young people and youth organizations on European level. The target group that will be involved in the planned project activities project are: -Youth organizations which are providing grass root youth work activities on local level. -Youth workers which are working with young people on a daily basis.The youth workers that will be involved in the project activities are the staff from the participating organizations and experienced in delivering activities on national and international level. -Young people, coming from the project countries, involved on local activities for testing the digital tool, Learnus+ Identified needs: -Continuous professional update for higher quality of youth work, for more effective reach out activities in emergency and development situations; -Filling the digital gap in professionals within organizations exploiting the big positive potential of digital Intellectual Outputs on youth participation; -Raising awareness in public opinion and policy makers about social issues affecting marginalized people, Quality of Youth Work and sustainable development goals as stated in Agenda 2030 related to Human rights and rights for education for all. Innovation: Learning by doing: "PLAY TO LEARN, LEARN TO PLAY!" Aim of the project is to improve with an innovative ICT tool, namely an interactive and supportive digital tool/educational game for youngsters, the quality and effectiveness of reach out activities for young people. Learnus+ will be a portable and free downloadable educational game based on the gamification method which will support the youth workers while they are preparing their regular activities. The project will be include: -Transnational meetings in Poland, Portugal and Italy; -Guidelines for using gamification tools in youth work; -Creating digital tool-educational game, Learnus+, innovative digital tool that will support youth workers while they will prepare their regular activities and supporting the learning process of young people by using serious games; -Training activity for testing the digital tool; -Local activities for testing the digital tool in each country; -Multiplier events in each country. Expected results: -IO1, Guidelines for using gamification tools in youth work ; -IO2, Digital tool/educational game - Learnus+, that will aim to improve the knowledge and digital inclusion and digital participation of young people with typical development and young people with disabilities; -Youth workers build and strengthen their capacities by using digital tools in their activities at the local, national, and international level. The methodology chosen by the partnership embraces digital innovation for social purposes including digital and gamification approaches seen as new frontiers for learning purposes, active engagement of youth workers and young people.Serious games are a subgenre of serious storytelling, where storytelling is applied outside the context of entertainment, where the narration progresses as a sequence of patterns impressive in quality.The idea shares aspects with simulation generally, but explicitly emphasizes the added pedagogical value of fun and competition. Conceptual learning in immersive virtual environments is a relatively young field but with an immense potential. Serious gaming can contribute to raise interest and motivation in students with a high potential to enhance the learning experience and families as well.
Our specific objectives were: -To offer new, innovative digital tool - a set of educational games on the Platform that youth workers can use to develop games and offer them to young people, -Improve the digital participation and digital inclusion of young people through online games provided by youth workers, -To encourage and motivate young people to use the educational games as a tool for online learning; -To strengthen the capacities of the youth workers and youth organisations in the digital youth work field.
We have applied for this project in response to identified needs of the youth sector in Europe: - Unexplored and not sufficiently used potential of online gaming as a tool of youth work, - Low skills of youth workers to use and develop digital tools and online gaming in youth work, - The need to continuously update youth work, raise its quality and reachout to young people, especially with fewer opportunities - with and without disabilities, - The need to develop digital skills in youth work professionals and abilities to turn online engagement of young people into youth participation. Our response was the strategic partnership project in which we explored the potential of online youth work, gamification and game-based learning, developed skills of youth workers to develop their own games and developed a tool to contain those games - online platform Learnus+. We wanted to develop tools for youth workers to ease their digital youth work and gamify online learning that they provide for young people. We were thinking about a cohesive online tool that could offer a simple engine for games that can envelop different mechanics. For effective games, but with super-simple ways to make them. Youth workers could make online games on any topic, or actually use the process of making games WITH young people to develop key competences. We wanted to provide one tool for this, so that youth workers won’t have to combine numerous free tools, or buy access to premium ones.