 Dear wanderers,
following up on our former post sharing about the European Solidarity Corps, we would like to invite you for a challenge and kindly remind you that there is only one month left to submit local Solidarity Projects. From now on every Monday, we will post a supporting booklet that can help you through this journey either as a young participant with an idea or as a mentor supporting a youth group. And the process will go as the following: -> Exploring Solidarity Activities - Booklet I. -> Understanding the Problem Better - Booklet II. -> Getting the Team Together - Booklet III. And last, but not least the series will close with some advises that will allow you not only to ideate, but realise an actual application that can be submitted for funding. All you need is devotion, curiosity and four more travel mates aged 18-30. If you are ready let us get started with the first booklet that was built around exploring your motivation and gaining some inspiration for working with the programme ;) For further support please reach out our local partners listed in the guide and introduced on our webpage. Backpack, itinerary, passport and you! See you next Monday:)
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 Let us start 2023 with Serious Gaming - try out our games developed throughout out the local game development pilots! The games were developed by young participants supported by the 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 consortium, under a Strategic Partnership funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. Each game addresses either a local or global challange via a youthfull perspective and can be linked to one of the 17 UN Sustainable Developement Goals aka. SDGs. Active Citizenship, Entrepreneurship and Soft Skills were our lead development pillars, as the impact reaches also beyond the games and can live further in local youth/ community initiatives and Solidarity Projects. Light a candle for no hunger, trick your mates on an Italian bus ride or experience how pink it is to be a girl! Try out our games and share your opinion with us! Ho! Ho! Ho! Are you ready for the festive season? Santa brought you one more present - Eduplay - Digital Training and Online Learning Community!! This self-paced MOOC - developed by the 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵 consortium, under a Strategic Partnership funded by the Erasmus+ Programme - is designed for youth workers/educators or practically to anyone who would like to reach impact in their local community/target group utilizing the power of games. It is based on the analysis of actual games and game developers. In addition, the materials presented aim to support actualising the content to your everyday practices in order to boost engagement, land earning efficiency and encourage contribution to active citizenship initiates. The overall objective of the training is to spark interest and to better position games and game development as potential development tool. Enroll to the course here: https://bit.ly/3VkRdts Let it shine and celebrate!   Until now, most of our activities were focused on working within our YfY tribe - consortium and our partners. All this time you had a chance to see what were preparing and doing via our website, social media as well as online webinars. We hope you've enjoyed this sneak peek.... And now the time has arrived to deeply share the results between new organizations, educators, game lovers, students and many more!! We will create local events in our six different countries to: - make an impact and waves outside our organizations, initiating future collaborations; - generate meaningful local activities to promote the project and empower educators; - share the knowledge on GBL, GDP and intellectual outputs of the project.
Join our local events: - TBA (February 2023, Poland & Portugal) - Games, Education, Empowerment (20th - 21st Jan 2023, Spain) - registration here - Action for Sustainability (11th-13th Jan 2023, Denmark) - Game ON (17th-18th Dec 2022, Italy) - registration here - Playground (10th Dec 2022, Hungary) - registration here  If you didn't have a chance to join us during our Game Fest/Game Seminar - no worries! Below you can find presentations by our amazing speakers! Keynotes: 
Project presentations:
Outputs:
We are just a few days away to publish details about the best event of the year so better get ready!  Do you want to make a difference in your community or in other countries abroad? If your answer is yes, keep reading! If you are between 18 and 30 and want to affect change in your own life as well as you are looking for an opportunity to help, we have good news; with the European Solidarity Corps aka ESC, you can do it! Thanks to ESC you can join following activities:
 Do not be scared, it is easier than sounds. You can get affect change in a wide range of fields – education and training, citizenship and democratic participation, environment and natural protection, migration, culture etc. or even develop your own games and game related ideas in your local community as we are concerned in YfY.
Through volunteering projects young people are taking part in the daily work of organisations and performing tasks that can have a real impact. While solidarity projects take place at the local level, it is a group of young people who develop their own project and make them happen benefiting both the local community and themselves, allowing them to pursue their dreams and trying things for real with the support of the European Commission. Potential projects should address a key challenge in the local community, while reflecting European values. Projects can last 2 to 12 months and require five devoted young participants from the same country. We consider this opportunity in particular important as it provides additional financial means to further develop some of the ideas developed during the local pilot processes and give additional first hand experience to participants to manage their own projects this time for real. Therefore we arranged online coaching sessions for our coordinators to be able to support such initiatives within and outside of our projects. Stay tuned to hear more about the project ideas developed on national levels or reach out to our partners if you are interested to know more. Watch this video to explore more! Additional resources in national languages: Dansk: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_da Español: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_es Italiano: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_it Magyar: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_hu Polski: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_pl Portuguêse: https://europa.eu/youth/solidarity/young-people/solidarity-projects_pt Read about the useful tools we are working on and our second transnational meeting that was hosted in Alicante, Spain in June 2022 to summarise our common adventure and our progress.  We started with a short introduction of the program for the next 3 days. It was a reflective time when we could honestly share our expectations, contributions, and fears about the ongoing meeting and the next steps of the project. Then we dived into the pilot processes of every partner. It allowed us to discover the best practices of our tribe members, and to learn about the most interesting ways to relate the SDG’s to youth work. Additionally, we could discuss challenges that each of the team is facing, as they tend to help emerge better versions of our work…  The second day was super busy, because we were brainstorming on our next outputs (IO4 /IO5), which will be an easy to use toolkit and supplementing facilitator cards that e will build it around following pillars embedded to the GDP process: 1) Active Citizenship: from problem to solution, 2) Entrepreneurship: from idea to product and 3) Soft Skill Development: practising collaborative creativity Additional hints and tips will be shared how to work with: 4) Educational and Cultural institutes and 5) Municipalities and Local communities as per our best practices in the consortium During intensive sessions, we came up with ideas on how to relate the topics to the game development process and gathered inspirational stories, materials, and tips to enrich our chapters. After we started working on the facilitation cards that will come soon too, ideating together on their content and design, so you have not only our recommendations, but some of our hands-on tools.  After all the creativity, the rest of the day was dedicated to planning the upcoming Game Seminar and Game Fest, our big multiplication event coming in October this year to embrace, to share and to celebrate!!! We carefully analysed the needs and expectations of the participants and ideated about potential implementations strategies for the local event to ensure its success and that the project can even reach more. And trust me, we even got some energy to shine also on the last day of our meeting that was about connecting with all the processes we have been walking through during the last 18 months. We took a glance and evaluated together the process and the impact we intend to make or made both within and outside the project and re-gained a sense of belonging inside the youth for youth family that will get us moving also in the last multiplication phase of the project.  We hope you will stay with us as here you will be able to try out our babies aka outputs, gain hands-on experiences and most importantly to give us some feedback to further improve them. To discover more about our adventure, follow us on Instagram and do not hesitate to reach our local partners to get you more involved! 2021 is over! How has the year been for us?January 2021 marked the start of a busy time for everyone involved in the project. After almost one year of anxiety connected to writing applications, uncertainty caused by coronavirus and eventually cautious optimism, we were finally able to concentrate on implementing our project! Within those 12 months have been marked with smaller and bigger achievements and challenges. Below discover few of them:  1) We got started and settled in as a consortium - just a bit of administration and most importantly agreeing about our cornerstones, which we hold on to. We were still full of energy and motivation, so the YfY knowledges sharing webinars took off to widen our network. 2) The time of our first transnational meeting came in an instance giving us the challenge of online transformation, though the togetherness was still fun ! We launched preparatory working groups to tackle potential risk and grounded some additional principles while working with youth. We evaluated, ideated, shared and started to reach out…  3) As a result, by the beginning of the summer, our first joint output was launched. Playful insights to game-based practices in 7 countries aims to inspire via sharing 21 case studies around existing initiatives in which games, Game-Based Learning (GBL) or the Game Development Process (GDP) have been used as a empowering tools boosting the competencies of youth as creative, engaged, lifelong learners. 4) And whoooo-whoooo, more than half year has already passed, so we felt it is high-time to observe our processes and to take a bit of summary holiday as our minds were already busy with crafting future plans and researching around our second intellectual output, which is the EDUplay Digital Training & Online Learning Community. This self-paced MOOC - currently under internal testing - was designed for learners who would like to reach impact in their communities via utilizing the power that lies within playfulness and games. We had a lot to share…..  5) Time flew by with creative content creation and finally the autumn allowed us to reconnect, this time for real….. at the beginning of November 2021, we finally met face-to-face and embarked on an adventure during the YfY Facilitator Training in Italy, Sermugnano experiencing the power of informal learning and collaborative creativity, As a result we reflected our process and created approximately 30 rapid game/games ideas and 4 major serious games closely connected to the Sustainable Development Goals. Organizing mobility in the midst of the pandemic was not easy, but all the moments were worth it! 6) The training course did not stand only for itself, but to train facilitators, who will be focused more on bringing GBL and GDP into local communities and Game Development Pilots to test some methodology that later can also be shared with the ones who are interested in game development in the context of youth empowerment. Young people will be invited to work on their ideas to develop serious games that potentially can grow into future small-scale local projects with further support of the communities and the Erasmus+ Programme.
Busy year, right?….and we even have a bit more than one to go. Although starting 2022 with one less partner, which is a true loss, but with even more energy to shift our focuses to moving local as we not only believe in games, but also in youth who are the agent of change. Let's EDUplay! LusòfonaX loaded, EduPlay is soon good to kick off…. It was quit a collaboration with long hours of brainstorming, writing, filming, interviewing, fine tuning and playing, made sure that you can learn the best from our partners sharing their expertise in our second intellectual output, which aims to be a self-paced digital course and online learning community for youth workers and educators, but also beyond for anyone with any appetite for game developments. Let us guide you through what we have planned as well as to give you a sneak peak on how the beta version shines already on the online platform.  In the first module we will explore the relationship between people, games and learning, discovering the essential elements games are made of and the many and diversified ways they can provide meaningful learning experiences.  How can you make a game great? Is it its type, aesthetics or the story? And how can you use games as educational tools? Answers to be provided the second module, where learners will begin exploring deeply the concept of game architecture, entering the world of games and drafting their first game.  How can we create a common playground where everyone is welcome to participate and the more they do it the better the result is? In the third module we navigate between the concept of Game Design and Game Development Process and explore participatory and cooperative methods to make them happen flawlessly within a team. Tips and tricks will also be shared guiding you how to turn a problem into a gamified solution, shaping the future of your community.  Why do we play? What motivates us? Keep us engaged? Creates flow? Makes us grow? Simple questions to explore in the fourth module with a pinch of pinch of psychology and design that will that may introduce you to new perspectives.  And last, but not least follows the glue, which is the story. The fifth module aims to explore the significance of storytelling and its potential for creating a frame for a game. Participants will practice building fictional worlds, populating them with characters and weaving the story - all to support game objectives. Activities are planned to motivate learners to unleash their creativity and put the theory into practice and inspire them to use games and their narratives for personal and community development before wrapping up and rounding the learning journey. As the more the merrier, in between the module contents forum activities were created to allow community building and practical exchanges between the participants, to provide even more space beyond the filmed interviews for practice oriented exchanges and learning from each other. Besides the companion, a compass is also provided in a format of a learning journal, where learners are invited not only to reflect, but also plan some action oriented local steps that allows them to turn theory and practice as well as to get started right after the course.  We are all ready to do so and prepared to run local game development pilots in 2022, about which you can soon learn much more on our dedicated blog thread sharing news delivered by the young participants involved in the different partner countries
Access for the course will also be granted along the journey, so get ready to learn more and stay tuned with us subscribing to our newsletter here to learn more about the process and our growing circle of associated partners!!! |
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September 2023
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