Game Design as an educational tool – international training in Reggio Calabria

The training course in a nutshell!

The first week of November, the consortium of the YITEG project developed a transnational training course in Reggio-Calabria (Italy) opened to young people involved in the different local groups of the project. Through non-formal methodologies and a learning-by-doing approach, the participants were able to tackle the subject of Transformative Economies in a very short time. The objective was to enable the young people to create a game on Transformative Economies by putting them, for real, in a process of game design.

During 4 intensive days, and inside a very friendly atmosphere, the participants:

Shared the results from their local mapping and interviews on Transformative Economies,
Enhanced their understanding about game based learning, serious games and gamification,
Tested different example of board games
Experimented and piloted a game design process,
Started the advisory group (supervising role for the board game creation),
Planned the next steps of the project.

The event was hosted by the organisation Ninfea, in cooperation with APICE – Agenzia di Promozione Integrata per i Cittadini in Europa becoming in a very nice cultural experience! Everybody had the opportunity to, not only meet each other in reality for the first time, but also to discover a rich local Italian city. The intercultural aspect of the training course gives strong emotions and strengthens our growing international community.

The 20 participants of 4 different countries (Italy, Greece, Spain and France) discovered and discussed the potentialities of the games for transformative purposes and put in practice their creativity abilities to create board games. They mobilised various qualities and competencies while following the different steps of the game design to achieve amazing and high value results. It is important to note that a lot of activities involved debate and discussion as a means to reach decisions and for the participants to develop their abilities to speak in English and defend their opinions in a democratic way. The task wasn’t easy, but in the end everybody learnt something from someone else and we could grow as a group.

We share here a short video with the explanation of the game design steps:

VIDEO ON GAME DESIGN – https://youtu.be/F2mC5VhC4II?feature=shared

So, what now ?

We took advantage of our training course in Reggio-Calabria to define the topic and basic lines to co-create and produce a board game to raise awareness and promote the knowledge of the Transformative Economies values.

With all the learnings of the training course, and the impulse of the partners of the project, the local groups are going to develop this game in the next months to get a first prototype at the beginning of April 2024.