Online Content Sharing Platform for Non-formal Education in Youth Work Erasmus Project

Project Title

Online Content Sharing Platform for Non-formal Education in Youth Work

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

A lot of youth workers are challenged to work creatively with children and youth who are not easily animated by a lot of things, because of the hard context they live/ grow up in. We’re talking about children who are hanging around on the streets, children on the move, Roma children and other vulnerable children or youth. Detached youth workers mostly work ad hoc and have to improvise, dealing with the changing situation they are facing, but are missing out on a variety of prepared games with a psycho-pedagogical focus, adapted to the needs of the children.
Mobile School vzw, Salvati Copiii and Ladies Union of Drama created an online educational content sharing platform for youth workers especially active in detached youth work, called StreetSmart Play (http://play.street-smart.be). Research showed us that similar platforms already exist, but those mainly focus on formal education or general youth work, they are language-specific, or very focused on supporting the own organisation or NGO who developed the platform. Exchange of good practices to other organisations, countries and environments is limited. Therefore, the objectives of those platforms are different. The games we offer through this unique partnership aim to empower children through non-formal educational activities. It will give an answer to the educational & psycho-social needs of disadvantaged children and youth to bridge the gap between communities in distress and formal educational systems. The main goals of the games are:
– Experience-based learning through play
– Stress relief
– Coping with traumatic experiences
– Self-esteem development & empowerment
– Creating positive learning environments.

As the scope of the offer of Mobile School vzw was limited, due to high logistical demands, and the existing variety of games was insufficient to answer the needs of partner organisations Ladies Union of Drama and Salvati Copiii and other organisations, we created a multilingual open resource platform. A small needs assessment learned us that many youth workers in Europe lacked resources to create a variety of activities targeting the needs of the children they work with. Also, a content sharing platform could help them to prepare their activities better and improve the impact of their work.

Co-creation was key to the success of this project, as well in the research phase, the development and the creation of games and activities on the platform adapted to different target groups. Therefore Mobile School vzw, Ladies Union of Drama and Salvati Copii partnered up in the development of this platform, each bringing its own experience and expertise to the table.

In order to build the platform, we did a user requirement research analysing the exact criteria we needed to incorporate in the design of the platform and wizard. An interactive wizard was developed so that every educator could add their own activities to enrich the content. On the StreetSmart Play platform, you are able to filter results, look for specific activities, based on topic, methodology, skills, developer, language and so on. And finally, through the developed wizard, the three partners of the project inputted their finest games and made them accessible to the wider community as well. We invited other youth organisations as well to input their best activities through the wizard on the platform, during the dissemination process and the multipliers.

So the two main functions of StreetSmart Play are: finding games and sharing games. And this is what we wanted to promote for youth workers. Till this point 1308 people participated in this project and the statistics on the platform have shown us there were already 673 different users who used the platform since the launch. On this point more than 250 educational games are made available on StreetSmart Play.

In the future, we want to build in some more social functions as well to strengthen The platform is developed as a complementary tool on “StreetSmart Impact”, the case management tool, developed in a former Erasmus+ project and will be joined by a new learning platform for training StreetSmart Learn in the future (http://www.street-smart.be). “StreetSmart Impact” gives organisations the potential to generate data about the needs of children and youth, while StreetSmart Play offers the possibility to look for specific activities targeting those needs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 104396 Eur

Project Coordinator

Mobile School VZW & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Save the Children Association Iasi Branch
• Drama Ladies Union and Open Hospitality House