With the project “DEBATING-CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS” will be promoted debates and along with drawing the attention of the students to recent social issues in order to build a future of United Europe. The aims of the project are encouraging young people in leading a dialog, listening to each other and being tolerant in communication with others. The key project’s aim, along with uniting five schools from five different countries, is to create capable, well-informed, searching and active society. The participants will learn to express openly their standpoint, defend sensibly and convincingly own position and acting tolerant with people who has different viewpoint. The practical lectures will help them to develop oratory skills, master presentation, critical thinking and communication skills in order to help them for better presentation in a job interview. During this project will meet each other persons with different interests, life experiences and views provoking them to think. When you a surrounded with bright young people eager to know, speak and be heard you feel dynamic together with them. There is a place for everyone. There will be a challenge for getting out of comfort zone and joining environment where everyone wants to speak, participate in society and change something. The communication skills and personal qualities develop while participating in debates, where the competitive atmosphere inspires the students to upgrade day by day in friendly environment, too. The experience is useful and valuable. Essential in this project is learning to defend own thesis, to commit to other’s thesis and to prove his/her opinion. Will be prepared “A handbook How to Create a Debating Club and Debate at school” in order to help debaters without training. At the training meetings will be cleared up the admissible means and methods in debating, organize meetings and discussions with MEPs in the partner countries and shared experience and impressions from local Parliaments’ work. All this will lead to forming citizenship with desire for coping along with social apathy. In this project will be involved students with special educational needs where they won’t feel unworthy, burden to society or isolated. Teachers will be trained to be mediators in conflict solving, mentors and trainers, because the debates aim training the participants to find information independently, systematizing it and devising arguments from it.With the implemented activities the project participants are going to learn to be tolerant and accept different viewpoints; also will learn culture of communication and ethics, which is extremely important in occasions of seeing aggression and lack of tolerance between young people. There will be cooperation with local students’ parliaments, NGOs, schools in the region, formal and informal institutions for disseminating the results and products of the project. The students will write essays on “I- Citizen of United Europe and a Future MEP” and the best essays besides being awarded will be published in a project collection. Enclosed certification program will motivate the students making them responsible citizens and boosting their self-confidence. Students will be able to work in 2030 when we take into account project’s results. They will have the certificates as evidence for employers on the labor market about the competences acquired in this project which will enrich beneficiaries’ portfolio.

Ifjusagi Nomad Klub and Balasa Gym as a result of common activities on non-formal education realized that we had gifted children that face similar problems to that from other EU countries. Teachers and youth workers, who work with gifted students, are often unprepared for working with them, and this is why we started to research on it, and we built a project that came up with ways of contributing to a better integration and development of their potential. Ifjusagi Nomad Klub and our partner schools from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Spain, joined forces to develop our institutional capacity of working with gifted children, as there was very little actual expertise and real skills of educators in handling them. The target group of our project was represented by students, teachers, psychologists, parents, youth workers, a total number of 1120 indirect beneficiaries, next the ones directly beneficiating from grants for learning/training mobilities. Our main goal was to support gifted students to achieve their potential to the maximum, so that being gifted would not become a barrier in the educational evolution of a student, but on the contrary, an asset for the student and for the society. The Objectives were:1.to change attitude towards knowledge for 350 gifted students , through the development of their creativity and critical thinking, emotional intelligence and social competencies;2.to form 30 specialists (psychologists) in teaching and implementing a program of intervention that can then be transferred in their home regions;3.to improve teaching competencies of 100 teachers working with gifted students, through the use of specialized methods, formal and non-formal, through their direct participation in project activities;4.to train 25 youth workers, as specialists in activities with parents of gifted children that will organize workshops for a total nr of 150 parents of gifted students from the partner schools. Partners did a research on how other countries intervene and manage the education of gifted students. - In the partner schools, an initial evaluation of students was done, to see if the initial research was accurate and start to identify the ones with potential who need guidance and support. The teachers set the basis of a program of activities with the parents of gifted kids, with the support of INK youth workers, and unfolded in each of the schools, a minimum of two workshops. - In the partner schools, the groups of gifted students were created, taking into consideration age groups. There were 16 sessions, one a week during 4 months. An initial evaluation using specific tests was done, and the activities of the ‘’Group for the development of creativity and critical thinking, of social and emotional competencies for gifted children’’ were initiated. In Spain, a set of activities for teachers were designed.In the 8th month, a joint staff training event took place in Hungary. The five days training course was to train teachers how to undertake in their own institutions a ‘’Group for the development of creativity and critical thinking, of social and emotional competencies for gifted children. After the course, all the participants implemented the development group in their own institutions with their gifted students. A short term exchange of pupils in Romania, was implemented in the 10th month with attandance of gifted students, teachers and youth workers from the partner NGOs. A guide with non-formal methods that were used by NGOs and schools in the working groups and during the mobilities were finished. In Romania, the intellectual output was finished: a curricula of the ’’Program for the Group for the development of creativity and critical thinking, of social and emotional competencies for gifted children’’. After the joint staff training event in Spain, to which teachers, psychologists and youth workers took part, dissemination activities in each of the partner country followed. In the 22nd month a multiplier event unfolded in Romania for the dissemination of the ‘’Happy - Gifted Student’ guide containing methods for a ‘’Group for the development of (…) for gifted children’’. In the interval 23rd - 24th months, final dissemination events, Skype meetings for deciding further follow- up measures, work on final report, and a multiplier event in Hungary for the guide with non-formal methods ‘’Happy - Gifted Student’’ took place, followed by smaller scale local events in all the partner countries, that were also a nice way to complete the project.

Today’s education is no longer about memorising, but about creating a context in which students make sense of what they are learning and enjoy the experience in such a way that they do not feel burdened by the amount of input. Unfortunately, however, we constantly struggle with the problem of demotivation and lack of interest in school that prevent our students from attaining better school results and we try to provide them with the drive to expand their learning, an attempt which is rarely successful. According to recent theories, using gamification in class is proved to provide a solution to these problems. Games, in any form, increase motivation through engagement. Gamification is about using gaming elements and apply them in non-game settings.

As globalization continues to confront the European Union with new challenges, each citizen will need a wide range of skills to adapt flexibly to a rapidly changing and highly interconnected world. These skills emerge today as key to allow people develop good-quality jobs and fulfill their potential as confident, active citizens. Based on the European Commission’s reports, early acquisition of these skills is the foundation for the development of higher, more complex skills which are needed to drive creativity and innovation. Education in its dual role, both social and economic, has a key role to play in ensuring that Europe’s citizens acquire the skills needed to enable them to adapt. Implementing key competences in schools involves not only specifying them in curricula, but also developing structures, innovative teaching methods as well as proper ICT tools that are open to teachers and students. Given their cross-curricular nature, this involves a whole-school planning. According to the European association KeyConet (Key competence Network in School Education), the key themes in teaching Key Competences for the 21st century relate to creating meaningful education based on real problems and engagement, interdisciplinary environments that enhance learners' experiences through goal-directed, active, authentic and collaborative tasks. Mobile Augmented Reality Games (MARG) are gaming environments that embed virtual, location-specific and contextual information into a physical site. These games require mobile or ubiquitous computing devices, such as hand-held computers or cellular phones, to enable game participants to access this virtual information. Instead of putting people in an artificial world, these games augment the physical world by embedding them with digital data, networking and communication abilities, and enhanced properties providing at the same time in-situ or inquiry-based learning experiences. Research on the use of MARG has shown potential benefits in fostering key competences such as collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, social and civic competences as well as cultural awareness. However, there is a lack of an organized effort to sum up the potential benefits of these games and more importantly to incorporate them in the teaching practice as teachers’ toolkit to foster students' key competences.The MARG is a KA2 Erasmus+ project in the field of Strategic Partnerships for School Education promoting innovation. It will involve the cooperation of 8 partners (4 Higher Education/Researcher Institutes and 4 schools) from three different EU countries (Romania, Greece, Cyprus, Netherlands). The project's objectives are to:•Explore examples of MARG for learning in the aspects of developing students’ key competences •Contribute to developing and implementing innovative technologies in formal or informal settings by developing user guidelines of MARG tools • Develop a learning design framework for teaching the following key competences through MARG:a) civic competences such as critical thinking, active citizenship, respect for differencesb) digital competences such as information and data literacy, communication and collaboration and problem solving• Make use of the existing AR games platforms and provide educators with the necessary technical knowledge to create their own content for fostering students’ key competences through learning about sustainable development • Provide educators with the tools and methodology to implement, evaluate and assess key competences of their students as well as act as educators-researchers through action research based educationMARG is s methodologically structured to fully support the production of the following 5 intellectual outputs:-IO1: An Augmented reality Teaching Toolkit including research on the available technologies and digital tools, users’ instructions, comparison of the available digital tools for the creation of Mobile Augmented Reality Games.-IO2: A learning design framework for MARG and educational scenarios: including research on the available instructional designs, delimitation of design guidelines, transformation of the design criteria towards the target competences and skills; 20 MARG designed by the participating teachers towards the development of digital and civic competences of students in the context of sustainable development. These scenarios will be available in an open-access repository for use by other educators across Europe.-IO3: 20 Mobile Augmented Reality Games, developed by the participating teachers, available in free-to-use AR platforms, that can be played by students and help them develop their digital and civic competences as well their transversal skills.-IO4: Implementation and a research report on the MARG intervention in the teaching practice that will evaluate the added value of these games in teaching key competencies.-IO5: A MARG21 MOOC which will provide European educators with training.