The main goal of parter organisations was to offer meaningful contribution to the development of young people’s digital citizenship skills and digital competences by using game-based approach to learning. To achieve this, partners had a two-fold approach. On one side, we wanted to create games that are fun and engaging, but remain educational. In order to do this, we analysed the broad topic of digital citizenship and decided to approach it by putting young people, i.e. players of our games into different scenarios that are realistic and relatable to them. At the same time, to avoid accidental correlations and comparisons to current news and trends, we decided to move the setting of our games into the future, where the current challenges of day-to-day life online become even more pronounced due to hyperconnectivity and advanced technology. On the other side, the goal was also to provide educators with enough materials and support to implement the games in their educational settings. To this regard, we made sure that the materials and guides are clear, easy to use, and structured in a way that educators can find necessary information fast.
Following the data published by EU and Serbian organisations, including European Commission, Council of Europe, Eurostat, NAPOR (Serbian National Agency of Youth Work Practitioners), and Eurofund among others, the partners organisations came to the following conclusions. Firstly, citizens of Europe live in a complex digital world that requires application of concrete skills and knowledge to navigate safely and responsibly. This is especially true when we take into consideration that current social medial algorithms led to increased polarisation and creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles where it is getting harder and harder to lead a constructive dialogue. Secondly, a small percent of young people uses their online time to participate in civic and political discussion, while at the same time they spend most of their free time online. This information points out that there is a potential to use digital tools for more active participation of young people. Thirdly, most of the young people use social media to get the news, while at the same time social media have high concentration of unverified information and young people are mostly unaware which tools they can use to fact check.