FUTURE Demonstration Event and Gamestorming Workshop

On June 28th, Aspire igen held the FUTURE project demonstration event and career innovation and game storming workshop. The event involved representatives from regional universities, Department for Work and Pensions, local high schools career guidance practitioners, trainers and education experts.

We presented the Future Time Traveller game, which is a European innovation, combining the career guidance towards the jobs of the future with game-based learning in 3D virtual world environment. Players participate with their avatars in the game, which teleports them in 2050 to discover how the world of work is going to change. The missions and challenges in the game help participants find out about the jobs of the future and develop many career skills in the same time.

The participants in the event also joined a career innovation workshop, in which they exchanged good practices and managed to generate ideas about new career games and tools. A lot of useful tips and inspiring good practices about game-based learning in career guidance have been shared during the workshop. The presentations from the event are available here: https://future-time-traveller.eu/bank-of-creative-ideas/

Here is some feedback from the participants in the FUTURE demonstration event in Bradford:

“I think the game is great it provides a much needed tool that can galvanize young people to think of their future in such a relevant way. The project day was informative especially the sharing of best practice in terms of game based learning, this project is exciting and will have great impact on communities who don’t visualize their future. “

FUTURE Seminars for policy makers

This first year of the FUTURE project has been a very productive time, full of inspiration and successful activities for the partnership:

We conducted a survey to identify how prepared are young people for the jobs of the future; how equipped are career guidance practitioners with the skills to guide them; and what kind of support will policy makers need to offer.

We produced a policy roadmap report Future-Looking Career Guidance Agenda.

We elaborated the methodology and scenarios of our Future Time Traveller career game and started the development of the 3D virtual world platform, in which the game will take place.

We launched the project website https://future-time-traveller.eu  and its Facebook page, which already has more than 270 followers.

The results produced so far have been presented during seminars for policy makers.

Presentation

Here are some of the messages the participants shared after the event:

“Wonderful, up-to-date, innovative, fashionable and very useful to young generation Z project! It is necessary to actively and quickly update the digital skills of the career counselors themselves. It is very important for them to “speak” the new “mother tongue” of young people in order to be as useful as possible.”

 “The future of our profession depends on our ability to keep up with all the trends. We must try to be informative for our clients. Game-based approach is the future of learning.”