New multi-university initiative to receive Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnershipgrant for hybrid game for students

TOGETHER, a new multi-university initiative, has received 400.000 euro as an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership grant. The objective of TOGETHER is to empower students to become agents of sustainable change, as envisioned in the GreenComp framework, through novel educational tools in the form of a hybrid serious game. The main purpose of such a “serious” game is for the players to achieve certain learning objectives and in this case it allows both discipline-specific training and cross-disciplinary and international collaboration. The participating universities are University of Groningen, Ghent University (Belgium), Uppsala University (Sweden), Ilia State University (Georgia) and University of Bern (Switzerland).

Assistant Professor Daniël Vullings of the Faculty of Economics and Business is the projectcoordinator. TOGETHER will develop the TOGETHER hybrid serious game in which students from different disciplines and partner institutes together run a future-proof city, taking different roles.

Vullings explains: “We integrate the game into five courses across partner institutes, create educational materials, provide eight educator workshops, collect and analyze data to study the effectiveness of the game in two academic papers, and organize eight local and one international outreach events to present our results.”

He is excited about the new grant and the project: “With the TOGETHER project, we offer all students the opportunity to together build future-proof cities, thereby grappling both with subject-specific and interdisciplinary sustainability problems. Each student will bring the perspective of their discipline while cooperating with students from other disciplines and international universities to explore new solutions.”

For more information, please contact Daniël Vullings (together.info rug.nl)