In the context of the ongoing social and economic difficulties worldwide, the project partners decided to support their youth workers to use games as non-formal learning tools for developing young people’s 21st century skills.
All partners played active roles in running activities that promoted the integration of immigrants and refugees by organizing various cultural and educational events. It was identified as a common need the necessity of equipping our youth workers with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to use games and gamification as tools to foster integration and social inclusion of people with different social and cultural background.
The present project was designed to satisfy a series of common needs identified in all partner organizations:
-to increase the attractiveness of the institutions by using innovative ways of operation towards their target groups which engages participants even more than traditional methods
-to foster the modernization of their organizations by creating more dynamics and highly energetic professional environments
-to improve the quality of training and youth work so as the organization can provide innovative and attractive services of a higher quality
The main objectives of the project were:
-to raise awareness about the educational purposes and social good of games in organizing activities for children and youth
-to support the professional development of youth workers
-to boost participants’ creativity and inspire them to create their own games
-to create a set of online tools that can offer support in organizing activities for young people
The training was designed for a number of 33 active members of NGOs, like youth workers, youth project managers, youth leader board member, peer educators and teachers that were at least 18 years old with no limit concerning the age of participants.
The non-formal methods used (energizers, icebreakers, pair work, group work, team-building activities) created a relaxing and friendly atmosphere encouraging participants to communicate, offer mutual support and establish friendships.
The GamTory project was realized in the frame of multicultural cooperation and constitutes the result of commitment and motivation in strengthening the professional development of youth workers. The impact on participating organizations was to empower their representatives to use the new tools, games or gamified experiences, that they created, for educational purposes and for creating social change. The games/gamified exercises were used as tools for providing innovative and attractive services to their target groups.
The international exchange of best practices positively impacted the modernization and development of the organizations involved, which are active cells of their communities. All participants acted as multipliers and passed the new acquired knowledge, skills, attitudes and outcomes to other organizations and institutions from their home countries.