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Today, on January 31, 2019, the New Shores project has reached its finale. During these 24 months, the project has become such an inherent part of our lives that it is hard to believe it’s over. Fortunately, we still have a lot of plans connected with the dissemination of the game, e-learning platform and other results that we are sure we won’t let you forget about New Shores for a long time! In a couple of weeks, for example, we are going to join the KA2 Now conference on Innovation in Youth Work, where we will be able to share the idea behind game-based learning with representatives of other KA2 projects in the youth field (more than 30!). Keep your fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, you can read a short interview on the Games4Sustainability blog, in which Zsuzsa and Maria from the New Shores consortium, betray the idea behind the project, and how we are going to continue our efforts to promote its outputs.

Just a couple of days before our project would officially end, the Rogers Foundation managed to reach one important goal for us: We took New Shores to the Rogers Person-Centred Primary School. The roots of the school and the Foundation are connected, thus Zsuzsa from The Rogers Foundation was very happy to visit the kids. On 28th of January, 2019 a group of 14-15-year-olds join the New Shores workshop. We had only 30 minutes for the session, but even this short time was enough to introduce the game and have a great first impression of it. The kids really liked the game, and their headteacher obliged to start a discussion about the foundations of democratic societies. Thank you for your participation, guys!

It has been the first time that the Rogers Foundation went outside of Budapest for a New Shores workshop! The organization came into contact with one of the school leaders of Szilády Áron Gimnázium in Kiskunhalas (Southern Hungary) during a conference in November – things quickly escalated, and the Rogers Foundation was invited to lead a teacher training workshop there! The Rogers Foundations’s executive director, Levente Turóczi traveled to Kiskunhalas on the 14th of January, 2019, and led the New Shores workshop for 14 members of their staff. They played the game and discussed its relevance for their school. As they said, they enjoyed the workshop very much and will use somehow the game later on. Thank you for the invitation, we hope you found it useful!

Our partner organization from Slovakia, TANDEM, n.o, led a train-the-trainer workshop on the 12th December in Komarno. Most of the participants were either teachers working with youth or active representatives of NGOs. Their main objective is thus the youth competency development. During a 4 hour long event the participants played the game, learned how to manage it as moderators and facilitators, and got to know how to join the New Shores class on the Edmodo platform. The game and all the accompanying materials met with a very positive and enthusiastic response from the participants as they were already forming their plans of using the game in their own work. The December event in Slovakia is only the beginning of a longer cycle that is going to gather at least 20 people interested in incorporating the New Shores game into a daily didactic practice.

On the 1st of December, The Rogers Foundation seized a new opportunity to try the New Shores game with teachers, this time at the Németh Imre Általános Iskola (a primary school) in Budapest. In the school there was a staff training day with several workshops running parallely for all the teachers, so there were some 50 teachers present altogether. 18 of them enrolled for the New Shores workshop. The group’s environmental awareness was amazing! They were so protective of the island that the forest condition was higher at the end of the game than at the beginning. Great job! After playing the game, we triggered a discusson on why and how to run a workshop with their students. We hope that the youth will be able to beat their teachers’ scores!

A little over a month after the first training for the New Shores moderators, we managed to organize yet another, more intimate, event for people willing to use the game with the youth. On November 29, 10 people from various educational fields met at the CRS office to play New Shores – a Game for Democracy and learn how to use it to trigger discussion about social and ecological responsibility, ethics, or sustainable economy. The positive energy they brought into the play and discussion exceeded our expectations. We hope that the game will turn a useful educational tool, and the materials collected at Edmodo will help them prepare more than one exciting game session!

In the afternoon of the 29th of November The Rogers Foundation visited the Eötvös Loránd Szakgimnázium, a high school in Budapest for a workshop for the staff of the school. Eight teachers came to play the game and learn how to incorporate it into their curricula. A serious discussion about the topics the game raises was intertwined with laughs and jokes. All the teachers expressed their interest in using the game with their students, thus we hope it will be a great experience for all of them!