Abstract:

In Europe, youth unemployment for all ages has worsened in the last few years. It is considered as the most serious issue facing each EU member country. Slovakia, as the member of the Europe union has the sixth highest unemployment among other EU countries. High youth unemployment rates do reflect the difficulties faced by young people in finding jobs. One of the way how to reduce the high amount of unemployed young people is to help them start own business. Youth entrepreneurship is vital for creating employment and sustainable growth and has become a priority in the EU policy agenda as a tool to combat unemployment and social exclusion as well as stimulating innovation among young people.

So, it is vital to inspire and motivate young people to start own business, assist them gain strong entrepreneurship skills and competences and ensure that the next generation of professionals have strong knowledge and entrepreneurship spirit. This results in their economic and social exclusion, which often leads to various mental disorders, because young people cannot be fully included in the society.

The specific situation in post socialist countries is lack of examples of good practices and missing traditions in the field of building sector of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). Even if the number of young people, who want to start their own business, increased, they perceive an actual beginning of their business as unrealistic due to shortage of financial and other sources.

One way how to find solution from above mentioned situation represent start-ups companies. Technology incubators and start-ups provide an environment to help young entrepreneurs jump-start early-stage technology companies by providing entrepreneurship training combined with low cost, low risk access to shared-use commercial and/or industry-specific technical resources. Their goal is to help grow the local economy by creating a community of support for technology entrepreneurs and cultivating an environment where start-ups can learn, test, create, scale and thrive.

The main objective of our research focus is to increase the competitiveness of young, mostly unexperienced people, on the job market in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Greece, Romania, Italy and Turkey. Young people usually have many various ideas, but it is very difficult to realize those projects due to lack of courage, funds or capacities. We are trying to answer on these challenges by broadening the young people economic knowledge, shaping the basics of entrepreneurship, transferring the ability to consciously plan your own career path, reducing disproportions in the knowledge of financial tools, presents example of successful start-ups etc.

Based on the facts described above, following specific aims are set up:
- To create and publish course content and open educational resources (OER), guiding young practitioners on the topics and skills most needed to establish and manage a business company.
- To develop a social game – one in which progress may be shared and compared with peers – that supports and links back to the Open Educational Resources (OER) to reinforce learning outcomes.

The obtained results can have a strong impact on youth, young students and in general young individuals that have interest to improve their situation on job market. Also, teachers/trainers/tutors and youth educational centres and schools will benefit by utilizing the developed tools in their teaching.

Keywords:

Gamification, start-up, open educational resources, social game.