It’s been a year since the KA2 Strategic Partnership for Innovation in the Field of Youth
“Gaming as Social Skills Learning Tool” started in June 2020 with the aim of investigating if gaming can be a resource to develop struggling young people's social skills and a learning tool for youths for the development of social and digital skills in local and european contexts.
During this year, the partners of the consortium (Veksttorget, PRIOS, WSEI, JUMP, Backlash and Karabağlar) have tried to find an innovative approach to develop methods, tools and activities to be used for the implementation of the two outputs provided by the project.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the organizations to do all the activities just online, and many physical meetings have been postponed or cancelled. Thanks to the use of video platforms and e-mails, the partners could organise their job and divide all the tasks in order to go on with the project and to reach the final goals.
The first intellectual output provided for the definition of a mapping strategy to score social skills and youth’s degree of socialization, participation in a community, interaction experiences, self-confidence and self-esteem; each partner conducted a research in its country to develop the necessary tools useful for the project’s needs.
The second intellectual output (Good Practice) is still ongoing and, in the first phase, partners analyzed the state of the art of the current situation, tools, methods used in different countries to use gaming as a social and learning tool, exploring the institutions interacting with this topic and the youths gaming preferences through an online survey.
After the theoretical part and the general overview, partners prepared a document in which are described some activities and tasks that youths who play against/with each other can perform while playing during the 6 gaming sessions organized by each partner in September/October 2021. This is the most practical part in which gamers can physically meet and test their social competences with the help of the e-coaches, professional figures who can attend a seminar in September before the implementation of the activities.
At the end of this phase, the Methodology pack and good practice handbook for “Gaming as social skills learning tool” will be released.
In November 2021, the italian partner Associazione JUMP - Gioventù in riSalto, will host for a week a big team of gamers and youth leaders for the Learning Teaching Training, a very important activity to evaluate the intellectual outputs and to share knowledge and discuss challenges among partners.
STAY TUNED for the next updates!
Author:
Ylenia Azzaro - JUMP Team
