ADDRESSING EARLY SCHOOL LEAVING AND DISENGAGEMENT FROM EDUCATION THROUGH SERIOUS GAMES' CO-DESIGN

Abstract

The Europe 2020 strategy identifies drop out from i-VET or early school leaving (ESL) as a key challenge to meeting employment targets. The Code RED project (http://www.codered-project.eu) has been developed in response to the high levels of early school leaving, drop-out and exclusion from education that often lead to unemployment, poverty and social deprivation. In taking actions towards achieving its goals, the project has been experimenting with a (serious) games' co-design methodology [1] through a dedicated co-design workshops' series, run within 2014 in the UK, Greece, Italy and Cyprus. The objective of the workshops was to engage young people in an interactive (participatory) process of designing and implementing digital educational games' prototypes, aiming at paving the way towards adopting these paradigms in the education and skills' acquisition process, thus maximising the benefit of participants. During the four organised workshops, around 30 young students and 10 trainers (including researchers and facilitators) walked through the pre-defined co-design process, trying to maintain the facilitation at the level 6 of the Hart's ladder [2]. Participants had the opportunity to work as a team, exchange experiences, share roles and responsibilities in the team, see examples of digital (educational) games/products developed by others so as to establish expectations, learn how to deconstruct the rules of games, create and discuss their own game ideas using low-tech prototyping tools (e.g. LEGO models, pack of playing cards, paper, digital means of taking notes, etc.), and finally implement prototypes of their game ideas, using game authoring software such as "Stencyl" (http://www.stencyl.com) and ARIS (https://arisgames.org/). The experimenting offered the opportunity to researchers to collect some very interesting observations, analyse them across the four involved countries and extract useful knowledge towards expanding already available education and employability curriculums from previous projects (e.g. the GOET project, http://goet-project.eu/).