What is Learn 2 Play?

Youth workers are always in need of new, creative resources that can help them engage, enlarge and refresh their toolboxes for supporting youth in their daily work. Also, European countries are struggling in relation to migration waves, long-lasting youth unemployment , economic and financial crises. Soft skills, including communication, social and people skills , character traits, career attributes and social intelligence are lacking in the youth of the current European Society. Three youth organisations teamed up together to enhance these forgotten skills, as we believe in youth, which are still eager to learn and have a larger sense of motivation.
To do this, youth workers and NGOs need to be equipped with and confident in using a variety of tools. It's agreed that in the online and socially distant world we currently live in, board games are a tool which is emerging again and games in general have proven to be an effective tool in order to transfer knowledge to people. The power of well-designed games can impact and change behaviours, while a printable board game makes the latter more accessible. A game is the best way to develop these soft skills. 
The objectives of the project can be summarized as: -To research soft skills development needs amongst youth and create a structured approach using game-based learning through focus groups and interviews -To develop and pilot an online game development course tailored to youth workers -To design, test and promote 6 fully developed printable educational games for soft skill development through a process of prototyping, testing and re-evaluating -To increase operational capacity of partner organizations in delivering quality educational services to young people and educators through game laboratories, training and playing events -To promote the use of educational games and spread the results of the strategic partnership among relevant stakeholders locally & internationally through physical and online multiplier events -To develop young people’s soft skills by the means of educational games and equip youth workers with tools to gamify their activities.
The project is being held in a transnational dimension to enable us to create a course and games that are applicable at a larger, European Level. It also lets us study youth needs to see correlations amongst countries and analyse available resources in multiple languages. Also, as partners, we have already achieved brilliant results, individually and together over short-term projects, so we believe that together, our impacts will be greater and better over a long-term one.