YoungRes ― An Introduction
YoungRes: Strengthening European Youngsters Resilience through Serious Games
Objectives
This project aims to overcome the acknowledged difficulty of efficient interaction with youth and vulnerable population at risk of radicalization or polarization. To do so, YoungRes advocates a new innovative approach based on digital technologies to overcome this barrier, built on previous achievements by project partners in game technology, social media analytics, and eLearning (e.g. SAVEit, RiskTrack, CrisisTracker, Clutler, E-genius, SmaCC).
Main Activities
- Development and testing of an educative methodology based on digital resources (specifically, serious games), in order to prevent radicalization and polarization;
- Creation of serious games (and other digital content) as a way to allow students to counter radical and polarized ideas;
- Development of a set of controlled studies in education contexts in Spain and Finland to test the methodology;
- Creation of an online eLearning platform, which will be used to:
- Test the serious game-based approach for polarisation identification and tracking;
- Provide a friendly interface that visualizes user’s argumentation for the game-based approach;
- Provide both qualitative and quantitative assessment of polarisation risk;
- Share resources between the different educators related to the platform;
- Train educators and other stakeholders in the methodology proposed.
Expected Results
Helping youth/vulnerable groups to develop critical thinking, improving their resistance to polarized ideologies. Integration of serious games in preventive educational policies. The development of new collaboration models and argumentation-gaming learning platform, increasing the societal impact.
Beneficiaries
The short term beneficiaries will be educational and local institutions directly participating in the testing and implementing phases of the project. The development of the online platform would open the door wide to large scale testing across EU educational institutions and random/or targeted population group.
