Following the work done over the past year, SHINE 2Europe has once again relied on the support of nurses and formal carers of older adults to see for the first time the outcome of the STEP_UP game, an educational game that promises to teach how to minimize the damage and risks of a pandemic.

In the last year, these same participants were involved in the first workshops and through their contributions helped to delineate in a real way the characters and scenes of what will be the game “STEP_UP | Stop Epidemic Growth Through Learning. This game is one of the results of the STEP_UP project, of which SHINE is a partner with 4 other international partners, and which aims to develop a training tool for the social sector and community stakeholders, teaching the best ways to prevent and deal with pandemic situations, through an educational game.

This time, the first scene of the game with the character Rosa Santos, a caregiver of a residential structure for older people, was presented to the nurses and formal caregivers. In this phase of the workshops, the main goal was to validate the understanding of the game scenes, how it’s played, how it goes to the following phases, or the effectiveness of the mini games presented. Since the participants had been a key support in structuring the game, they were pleasantly surprised to see their ideas materialized. Players will learn the right measures to proceed during a pandemic through multiple choices of right or wrong actions, mini games to distinguish fake news from true information or realize the importance of government measures.

In recent years it has been proven that “gamification” improves learning skills, particularly for young people and people with low qualifications. The game will be aimed at professionals in the social sector but can also be used by any citizen and will be an important tool in adult training.

STEP_UP is a European Erasmus+ project and is being developed by a consortium of several partners, coordinated by SHINE 2Europe, and having AFEdemy (the Netherlands), ISIS (Germany), Wise Angle (Spain) and a CIPH (Croatia) as partners.