Play 2 Learn

This project wants to improve the quality of learning activities for organizations that participate in projects in Erasmus+.

When youngsters use a model of behaviour to gain a better understanding of that behaviour, they are doing a simulation. When youngsters are assigned roles as buyers and sellers of some good and asked to strike deals to exchange the good, they are learning about market behaviour by simulating a market. When youngsters take on the roles of party delegates to a political convention and run the model convention, they are learning about the election process by simulating a political convention.

Why Teach with Simulations?
Instructional simulations have the potential to engage youth in "deep learning" that empowers understanding as opposed to "surface learning" that requires only memorization. Deep learning means that youth:
Learn scientific methods including:
-the importance of model building.
-the relationships among variables in a model or models.
-data issues, probability and sampling theory.
-how to use a model to predict outcomes.
Learn to reflect on and extend knowledge by
-actively engaging in youth-youth or instructor-youth conversations needed to conduct a simulation.
-transferring knowledge to new problems and situations.
-understanding and refining their own though processes.
-seeing social processes and social interactions in action.

Effectiveness instructional simulations require:
-Instructor preparation. The good news is that instructional simulations can be very effective in stimulating youth understanding. The bad news is that many simulations require intensive lesson preparation.
-Active youth participation. The learning effectiveness of instructional simulation rests on actively engaging youths in problem solving.
-Post-simulation discussion. Youths need sufficient time to reflect on the simulation results.

This youth exchange aims at participants in youth workers, youth to develop their learning skills and competences to increase the capacity of their own and their organizations.

In our opinion this can be done mainly by: improve the level of key competencies and skills, developing exchanges of best practices for organizations participating in the project, knowledge of the organizations involved, the desire to develop new ideas for future joint partnerships.
The second direction of the project is to develop reliable partnerships with organization who want to develop new projects.

In this respect the activities of this youth exchange is mainly addressed to youth workers from participating organizations and youth who wants to improve their capacity to learn through game.
One outcome of the project is to develop a learning simulation game together with a trainer’s manual, as a tool to improve learning abilities to youth.
The expected results of the implementation of the project are: to increase the capacity of the organizations by developing learning tools, to create trained youth workers and youth who are multipliers of the experience for other position.

The long-term benefits from the implementation of the project will be: raised the image and competence of organization, activities with higher quality that will lead to better implication in youth problems, opening the local communities for intercultural dialogue and development of European identity and solidarity.

The project will be based on non-formal learning methods and will be highly participatory and experiential.

If you want to be our partner, please fill in the attached form and send it by e-mail.
You should deliver to us – by email to madalina.albu@centrul-solomon.ro:
-Project questionnaire/Application form
-Mandate letter
-Preliminary agreement

Deadline for application is 20 April 2016 16:00: Romanian Time.
ONLY FULL applications will be considered!