Abstract:

Europe faces a set of extremely relevant challenges in the near future. Such challenges are directly related to the question of national, European and international citizenship, which is increasingly present in national debates throughout Europe. The influx of migrants to Europe reinforce these debates. In fact, according to the migration data portal (www.migrationdataportal.org), the number of migrants now represents 11% of the European population, when compared to roughly 6% in 1990. Additionally, inequalities still persist in Europe. For example, according to Eurostat (www.ec.europa.eu/eurostat) the European Union (EU) employment rate for men was 78.3 % in 2018, exceeding that of women, 66.5 %, by 11.8 percentage points. Finally, the latest (2018) intergovernmental panel on climate change report (www.ipcc.ch) highlighted alarming findings on global warming, stating that the average temperature should increase 3°C by 2100, leading to an irreversible disruption in biodiversity.

In this context, schools, both a place for the transmission of knowledge and the learning of citizenship, appear as the ideal place to make learners aware of the issues quoted above.

This is why a consortium of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) - Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool Antwerpen (Belgium), Dundalk Institute of Technology (Ireland), Hochschule Nordhausen (Germany), ISPGaya - Instituto Superior Politécnico (Portugal) and Uniwersytet Lodzki (Poland) - and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) - le Partenariat (France), Kurioz (France) and CityLink Haarlem (Low Countries) - were awarded a grant, under KA201 Erasmus+ Program, to produce innovative content to raise awareness to these issues. This is the project JEU: Let's play together for the European Union. As such, JEU aims to contribute to the creation of a more inclusive and respectful European society by raising the awareness and empowerment of learners and their teachers to European citizenship, gender equality and environmental protection.

In the present article, with the project just starting, we make a detailed description of its main objectives, the methodology used to implement it and to monitor it, the tools that will be used to assess it and present the main outcomes expected from it.

Keywords:

Serious Games, Citizenship.