Our goal was to support adult educators, our direct target group, by providing them with a board game (SPAGAME) to use when working with adults to deal with the different stages of pandemic burnout, such as fatigue, anxiety, high levels of occupational stress, conflict of tasks and high perfectionism. The overall objective of the SPAGAME project was to improve the competences of adult educators through coaching, mentoring and training to develop the self-awareness and clarity of young adults and adult learners, reduce the risk of burnout due to a pandemic in working life and equip them with tools for flourishing, for conscious leadership, purposefulness, determination and contribution to the development of others and oneself. To achieve our goals, we structured our project activities around the development of the Stress PANDemic Board GAME for adult learners (SPAGAME). In the game development process, we aimed to improve both our own competencies and those of the wider target audience, as we involved adult trainers in the game development process to ensure that the outcome of the developed project meets their specific needs.
The partnership's motivation to develop the project stemmed mainly from the lack of useful tools and interactive games in dealing with the pre-stages and stages of pandemic burnout in our and other trainers' individual and group coaching work with adults. These issues are addressed with a variety of approaches, from coaching and therapy to mindfulness and emotional intelligence, to NLP and emotional flexibility, to meditation, to design thinking, reducing workload and working hours, etc. The aim of the two participating organizations from Bulgaria and Belgium was to give opportunities to young people and adults systems and design thinking tools to use SPAGAME to help their clients reduce the negative effects of burnout on their motivation and productivity and to support them to contribute intellectually and expertly to their environment.