Gamification in non-formal education and youth work
Throughout the GamifyEU project, we had the chance to produce and implement many various learning and development activities to achieve the goals of bringing young people of Europe closer together and strengthen their relation to the Europe itself.
Due to the many challenges caused by the pandemic, we had to re-create each activity and transfer most of it online, therefore we had to be very creative and innovative to be able not only to achieve the main goals, but to keep young people on board and engaged as much as possible. We have focused on co-creation and learner-centered approach, using many relevant online platforms and digital tools to support the exchange and facilitate the learning through different digital and online methods as small group work, discussions, moving debates, stimuli and content (videos, texts, illustrations, sound) reflection and expression, drawing and writing, presentation, simulations, real life practice and various creative processes.
It is important to mention that, whenever the situation and conditions allowed, we experimented and implemented the hybrid and blended types of activities, where the national teams could occasionally meet in person, and then exchange the views with their European peers online. We have selected number of examples of such activities and methods that we believe could be useful for the readers of this publication. The exercises and methods are extracted from variety of different online activities done to inspire or showcase ways how to approach the digital transformation and gamification in working with young people on specific topics covered by this project. Some are selected because of the interesting and creative ways the digital tools and platforms are used for achieving the goals, some because of the innovative and interactive methodology applied and some because of specific topic that they are presenting.
We hope you will find the inspiration in them and try to apply them in your work, maybe build on them or even try and invent your own!
Selected Activities
GamifyEU Virtual Youth Exchange
EU Gaming Ideathon
Creativity Lab
GamifyEU Virtual Youth Exchange
ABOUT:
Youth exchange aimed at building bridges between young people in 5 countries sharing their thoughts and dreams about the future of Europe, especially in the light of COVID19 and its impact. Participants have learned about the EU, its milestones, values and principles, EU youth goals, different aspects of human rights, intercultural learning and understanding, as well as planned their follow up activities on a local level. They also played new Engage, Connect, Empower storylines and gave feedback to developers regarding potential improvements.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING:
The youth exchange was imagined to be composed of activities that happened with the national groups in each partner organisation and the ones that happened online on different virtual communication platforms, where all the groups came together, exchanged their opinions and ideas, had a chance to directly communicate with each other in a facilitated way. The virtual Youth Exchange was preceded by physical or online activities on national level where groups had their preparatory activities with their organisations and team leaders, as well as got support for their participation in the activities of the European exchange.
This was one of the first activity that we have reimagined from what originally was planned. To do that, we have used 2 main platforms that served as our gathering and communication spaces. One of them being Zoom and the other Discord, the free online communication platform based on channels and mostly used by young people into gaming, that we have repurposed for our needs. We have created specified channels for each national group and channels that followed the modules of the Exchange itself that allowed fast communication, sharing different files, using of popular elements as memes, tags and emoticons etc. Of course, we had to be very creative with the digital tools and visual aspects of the exercises, to be able to motivate and really involve young people in an online part of the activity. Interestingly enough, we also tried our best to make the virtual communication as informal and as smooth, mimicking the natural conversation that you would experience in the physical trainings.
EU Gaming Ideathon
ABOUT:
During the48 hours event, young people entered a collaborative challenge together with their peers from all over Europe and built solutions for different challenges Europe is facing. Much like a hackathon, in this Ideathon participants engaged in a creative-thinking, solution-finding process during which they learned new things, developed an idea, prepared a pitch and competed with the other participants, all the while working as a team. The winning team, composed of young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece and Portugal, developed an idea around the topic of “How can young people fight fake news?”. The winner was voted by the participants of the event. During the event the participants also had the chance to play games created within the GamifyEU project and to explore Gather.town as an online platform which they very much enjoyed. This innovative format of an online event was evaluated very positively by the participants.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING:
The idea was to offer a format different from the one young people are used to and to test the transferability of a format such as hackathon that usually involves IT experts into youth work setting. The idea was for this to be a 48h adventure in which young people take charge by entering a collaborative challenge together with their peers from all over Europe and show what the Europe of their dreams would look like and to turn their ideas into recommendations as the last outcome of the GamifyEU project. The ideathon was relying more on the development of the ideas, rather on concrete technical solutions, and using potentials of diverse group of young people from all across the Europe come up with new and fresh solutions for existing challenges. Like everything else, this was also transferred online and we used variety of digital tools and platforms to manage the work and engagement of participants in such an intense type of activity. Beside very peculiar starting times of the programme sessions (i.e 10:27h or 19:02h) in order to keep it interesting and also promote the out-of-the-box thinking energy of the event itself, we also kept the content fairly dynamic with switching it between inspiration, learning, developing and fun, as well plenary and group work. The healthy competition aspect of it, where at the end we had voting for the best idea and a dedicated prize helped the motivation and enthusiasm.
Creativity Lab
ABOUT:
As part of the GamifyEU process, YEU has organised the Creativity Lab event, consisting of five online activities within one month. Young people such as workers, youth leaders and educators, together with gamers and game enthusiasts joined in. The objective was to create a space for them to discuss and develop proposals on how different Human Rights Education activities could be gamified online. Through online tools such as Zoom and Gather.town, they explored human rights’ concepts and gained knowledge on their importance. They have also gone through the gamification concept and its core drivers, and they have understood how we learn and the different learning styles of people. The participants deconstructed the games to identify the learning goals behind each storyline. They applied this new knowledge by going through the creative process of developing scenarios for new games. Within the report you can find the specific session plans that were used, the results and outcomes, as well as our reflections and comments regarding them and the overall process.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING:
Within it as it was a “Creativity Lab” we made sure to provide adequate space for the participants to really get into the creative mind-set and work jointly and comfortably towards the development of the outcomes. As the Creativity Lab happened online, we used various online platforms to maximize the experience for the participants (such as Zoom, Padlet, GatherTown, Google Slides & docs, Canva, Mentimeter, youtube etc.). What also makes it interesting is the fact that in a co-creation process, on one side we had young people who have maybe never so interested in gaming world, but had an activist idea to change or improve specific challenge or situation, and on the other we had game enthusiasts, gamers, and game developers who had knowledge of gamification logic and mechanics in their hands and we made them work together during a co-creative dynamic process online. This resulted in numerous newly created game storylines that tackle specific social challenges and focus on the topics covered in this project.