Comenius Project

Social Mindedness In LEarning communitY (SMILEY)

Catania (IT), June 2012 -The main objective of the multilateral project SMILEY is to create strategies for conflict resolution using ICT technologies. It seeks to counter social exclusion and marginalisation in the various school contexts of the project's partner countries: the UK, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Turkey.




Its methodology revolves around planning and creating an integrated digital eLearning platform that exploits the potential of new technologies in education. The first phase involves the development of a specific SMILEY methodology that enables teachers to use multimedia technologies as an educational tool to engage students in social problems, for example bullying, violent attitude, and racial of religious discrimination.

The second phase focuses on the practical training of teachers. This phase involves more than one hundred teachers in a training course on the potential of multimedia didactics and includes an educational textbook designed to facilitate the transmission and dissemination of the SMILEY methodology among other teachers in their home countries.

The third phase addresses the direct involvement of students in the testing of "Your Town", an educational role-playing game designed to test and stimulate the students' level of social mindedness. Through a game-based scenario and the safety of an interactive virtual city, students aged ten to sixteen face various situations of everyday life, some positive and others negative, and learn to manage them with a constructive and responsible behavior.

Selecting a mission, the player enters the town scenario. Hidden across the town various "incidents" connected to each mission are occurring. These are in the form of small, sometimes hard-to-find animations. To earn points, players must quickly discover these incidents and report them. As a reward, players are given additional clothes and accessories with which to dress their personal avatars, for example skin colors, hairstyles, expressions, and clothes.

A thumbnail of the avatar is shown beside each player's name in the high score tables. When played in the school environment, "Your Town" gives teachers rare insights into the views of their pupils and provides an opportunity to continue exploring the theme of social mindedness through role playing of the scenarios presented in the game.