Objectives
Our main objective was to create an environment where young people would explore the concepts of gamification and game-based learning. To ensure this, we synergised the expertise of five organizations that have relevant experience. Group leaders from Italy, Georgia, Spain, Turkey and Lithuania provided activities that raised awareness about gamification and game-based learning. In this way, participants from these countries were able to contribute their respective knowledge and experience and in turn learn from others. In this way, improved the level of key competences and skills, with particular regard to their relevance for the labor market and their contribution to a cohesive society. “Keep It Interactive! Foster The Engagement!” facilitated the exploration of the topic, built skills and led to the dissemination of these to their respective societies.
Our second objective was to ensure the international dimension of activities in order to enhance capacities and help participants grow professionally as well as personally. The fact that partners represented different programme and partner countries and had different cultural and experiential backgrounds let us reach this.
The other objective we had was to raise solidarity and the sense of respect between participants. Gamified sessions were meant to foster a great and inclusive sense of identity, underlining the value of maintaining pluralism and non-discriminative, equal atmosphere.
Considering the needs and objectives stated above, our main motivation to carry out this project was to make our idea more tangible – to spread knowledge about gamification and game-based learning so that participants are more aware of the concepts and their new competencies enable them to apply these methods to their lives and share the outcomes for greater satisfaction in the future.
Implementation
“Keep It Interactive! Foster The Engagement!” was an international mobility for young people (youth exchange). Participants got together aiming to share knowledge and competencies to explore the topics of gamification and game-based learning in detail. They started the mobility with energizers, get-to-know and team building activities. We created an open, friendly and non-formal environment and then moved to the main ideas. Participants slowly started to explore gamification. They got the idea of game-design elements and explored good and bad practices of it. Then they are introduced with the game-based learning methodology – slightly different and a bit confusing, but participants were challenged to see the difference between these two main concepts and made some case studies regarding the topic. During the next days they created connections between gamification and their personal lives. They were able to see the added value of gamification to daily activities, learning process, group interaction, productivity, initiatives, and preventing bad be