Acknowledging the global need to preserve our cultural heritage aptly documented in the New Agenda for Culture (EC 2018), the scope of the AR4Youth project centralised at training young people in conceiving, designing and implementing an AR project for digitising and augmenting books, guides or manuals by using as case studies fairy tales and myths in Greek, Lithuanian and Estonian. To address this goal, the project aimed to achieve the following objectives: - To enhance advanced digital skills (i.e., use of AR technologies) of young people with special emphasis on NEETs; - To equip young people with competitive qualifications for either entering the labour market or for conceiving their own entrepreneurial future; - To raise the awareness of young people on the cultural heritage aspects of partner countries; - To sensitise them into the importance of preserving cultural heritage and more specifically the traditional fairy tales, myths and legends through digitisation; - To increase the quality and innovation of youth work through the creation of advanced digital training.
While Covid-19 has caused immeasurable disruption to the social, economic and educational system across the globe, it concurrently stimulated the acceleration of technological advancements and innovations to counteract the inestimable impacts of the pandemic and further facilitate the adaptation of the society to the unprecedented demands of the virtual environment with Augmented Reality (AR) to be one of those seen an exponential growth during this period (Le and Dinh 2021). The need to train young people on advanced digital skills becomes now a vitality taking into consideration different policy frameworks under implementation at an EU level pushing towards technological development and transformation (e.g. European Digital Strategy; Digital Education Action Plan).