Fighting discrimination

Besides the effort done by the European Commission and countries discrimination these days is still a problem that affects a percentage of the population. Mobility among countries has brought new ways of discrimination based on ethnic origin, grounds of age, grounds of disability, sexual orientation, grounds of gender, religion of beliefs, etc.

Education without prejudice is an anti discriminatory educational project designed to built and support civic society. As stereotypes and prejudice result in discrimination practices in our societies, the project aims to work against stereotypes and prejudice, to support creating new democratic society free from discrimination.

Project will focus on gender bias and homophobia, still present in European society. Discrimination in those spheres will be overcome only when stereotypes and prejudice disappear. That is why the project aim is to prepare educational anti discriminatory curricula and manual, to prepare teacher and/or trainers and to prepare the scheme of teaching of anti discriminatory trainers.

Anti discriminatory curricula will be based on the studies on the main problems and needs of partners’ countries. Potential trainers will be taught about basic spheres of discrimination in their own environment, methodology of successful teaching and particular methods of anti discriminatory training. Methodology of anti discriminatory training will be based on workshop method combined with online activities available on the open source platform. The e-learning part will be tailored to suit the learning needs of the target group. During the design phase, the requirements concerning the learning preferences will be investigated and taken into account while developing online activities. The accepted didactical and instructional methods will enable to create the content according to the user requirements.

Interactive Game creation

As opposed to the integration of complex, expensive in production and commercialised games in didactical settings, this project clearly follows the second approach in serious game- based learning that involved learners and transform them into game structures and principles.

The project aims and outputs are:

- To develop a freely available online editor published under the open - source principles for serious game creation that helps teachers and students that lack a technical background to actively participate in the game - creation process.

- To develop an online- portal and game- server that makes these newly created games available and features them in a miniature virtual world to facilitate the exchange and further creation of serious online- games for learning.

- To facilitate the integration of games from the online- portal / game- server in learning management systems (e.g. Moodle) and social communities.

- To offer the game editor in the following languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Finninsh and Dutch.

This novel learning and teaching approach of the project leads to an enhanced participation of the learners in their own learning process and addresses know- how, abilities, skills and models ways of communication and social networking, which young people are familiar with today. Thus students will be made to teachers by offering their expertise in gaming and social networking. Teachers can easily integrate their content- related expertise without the need for technical know- how or background. Additional impacts are cross- cultural interactions between users and developers as well as an increase in learners’ motivation and competences.

Master-D will be a partners in this project working closely with EDEN network in the Quality Plan and other activities.