Abstract:

Cyberbullying is causing widespread social concern and harmful consequences on children’s well-being. It requires advanced tools and techniques to enhance the education of Cyberbullying among children. The purpose of this study is to apply the effective use of “Voice of User” in the development of a game for educating youth about cyberbullying.

The project BECYBERSAFE - Beat Cyberbullying, Embrace Safer Cyberspace, co-funded by ERASMUS+ / Strategic Partnerships (Ref. 2014-1-TR01-KA200-013354) of the European Commission, aims to facilitate adolescents, parents, teachers, and other educators with knowledge about the safe use of social media and to provide them guidelines on how to prevent and tackle cyberbullying.

The project is being developed between December 2014 and November 2016, involves partners from Cyprus, Czech Republic, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey (Coordinator), and United Kingdom, and is focused on developing several educational and training resources targeting educators and young people.

These resources will be built based on a research process that involved a sample of students aged 9-14 years old across partner countries, who were asked to complete a self-response questionnaire assessing their experiences of cyberbullying, their main needs in terms of prevention, and their opinion about what should be done to prevent/tackle cyberbullying. This paper presents a short overview of the project, and describes some initial findings and development of the project.

Keywords:

ICT, Cyberbullying, educational tool, teenagers.