For the students in the participating schools we wanted to design and implement pilot lessons encouraging their active participation and supporting their personal motivation to learn and to improve the level of their skill acquisition in mathematics, natural sciences and English. For the teachers and their teams in all three partner schools we wanted to create an open and experiential environment that could directly motivate them to work on themselves and to learn - discovering innovative learning and teaching methods continuously. We wanted to support the teachers to pilot and share the practical examples of using gamification and experience more fun, interaction and active participation together with their students. In the overall context of the project partnership cooperation we also wanted to promote inclusion and improve the quality of life of involved school communities and the quality of students` lives inside their school communities.
We wanted to design a project to help us transform classrooms in our schools into friendly places for children, where their internal motivation to learn will be supported. In this context we decided to work together on designing and testing the use of gamification (as the use of game elements in education) to address our shared needs and challenges of effective education. We agreed to focus on piloting gamification in teaching of mathematics, natural sciences (as STEM subjects) and English as a foreign language. At the same time, we wanted to use the innovative methods to make education accessible and easier for those children who struggle with some form of exclusion, or with health, social or other disadvantage. Although we had some experience of using several game elements in our schools, we could not directly talk about gamification. Students earning points, grades, and at the end of each school year, moving "to a higher level" – a system that does not automatically increase students' interest in studying and achieving better personal results. Therefore, it was important for all three partners to better understand gamification and to have a better insight under what circumstances its elements could change children's behavior.