Digital Skills for Elderly People: A Learning Experiment in Four European Countries

Abstract

The problem of learning digital skills among the elderly addressed in this paper is focused on a methodology that tries to overcome the barriers in adoption of touchscreen digital technology faced by older adults, by using a game-based learning approach. The paper provides an overview of some early results and findings from an exploratory study among the elderly from four European countries based on the use of touchscreen tablets for playing games as a pre-course activity for learning how to use a smart phone. The learning was carried out with pre-selected games designed to enhance the motor skills of the players and improve the coordination between cognitive and motor skills capacity. The results presented in the paper were collected within the partners of the project GIRDA – Gameplay foR Inspiring Digital Adoption from the European ERASMUS+ programme. The paper describes the research setting, the experiments and the results accompanied by discussion and the conclusion.