<< Background >>--Background--While Covid-19 has caused immeasurable disruption to the social, economic and educational system across the globe, it concurrently stimulated the acceleration of technological advancements and innovations to counteract the inestimable impacts of the pandemic and further facilitate the adaptation of the society to the unprecedented demands of the virtual environment with Augmented Reality (AR) to be one of those seen an exponential growth during this period (Le and Dinh 2021). The need to train young people on advanced digital skills becomes now a vitality taking into consideration different policy frameworks under implementation at an EU level pushing towards technological development and transformation (e.g. European Digital Strategy; Digital Education Action Plan).<< Objectives >>--Objectives--Acknowledging the global need to preserve our cultural heritage aptly documented in the New Agenda for Culture (EC 2018), the scope of the AR4Youth project centralises at training young people in conceiving, designing and implementing an AR project for digitising and augmenting books, guides or manuals by using as case studies Greek, Lithuanian and Estonian fairy tales, myths and legends. To address this goal, the project will aim to achieve the following objectives:- To enhance advanced digital skills (i.e., use of AR technologies) of young people with special emphasis on NEETs;- To equip young people with competitive qualifications for either entering the labour market or for conceiving their own entrepreneurial future;- To raise the awareness of young people on the cultural heritage aspects of partner countries;- To sensitise them into the importance of preserving cultural heritage and more specifically the traditional fairy tales, myths and legends through digitisation;- To increase the quality and innovation of youth work through the creation of advanced digital training.<< Implementation >>The project is evolved around three Project Results; PR1 aims at engaging a youth team, as project’s consultants, for the development of the Training Material and in particular, the selection of fairy tales, myths and legends to be used for digitisation and augmentation. PR2 relates to the actual development of the AR Facilitator which will guide the users into distinct steps for the development of an AR project by focusing on the conceptualisation, design and implementation of the project. PR2 will additionally engage a youth team to pilot the AR Facilitator by digitising and augmenting cultural heritage fairy tales, myths and legends; Finally, PR3 focuses on the development of the AR4Youth Impact Evaluation Kit to be used by young individuals and youth workers to assess the knowledge and skills gained from the use of the AR Facilitator in order to receive the project’s Certificate. A Training Activity will be organised in Lithuania in order to equip routh workers and trainers with the necessary knowledge and skills required for delivering the AR4Youth training to young people and young NEETs effectively. Finally, five multiplier events to diffuse the project results in the local communities in Cyprus, Lithuania, Greece, Netherlands and Estonia will be organised.<< Results >>Besides the tangible results produced by the project, namely, the AR4Youth Training Material, the AR4Youth Facilitator and the AR4Youth Impact Evaluation Kit, the project will: provide increased awareness on the concepts of Augmented Reality and Design Thinking Methodology; enhance advanced digital skills of young people and NEETs in particular allowing them to (re)enter the labour market or develop an entrepreneurial mindset; promote the preservation of cultural heritage which can be achieved through innovative technologies; appreciate the importance of cultural heritage.

The discussion on values is now as pertinent as ever. The vision of VAST is to bring (moral) values to the forefront in the field of advanced digitisation. VAST seeks to study European values across space and time and to exploit the digitised tangible and intangible cultural assets associated with values, in order to support and empower cultural heritage institutions and practitioners, promoting this way Europe’s cultural heritage. Emphasis will be placed in those values considered fundamental for European Union and a unifying axis for all member states, forming sustainable communities and enabling citizens to live well together, such as freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, dialogue, human dignity, and the rule of law. By providing advanced modelling, methods, techniques and digital tools, VAST will study how the meaning of specific values has been expressed through different narratives and user experiences. We aim to track these values in different mediums across space and time. We will study (1) values in ancient Greek tragedies and how they are appropriated by contemporary theatrical plays and audiences, (2) values in works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and how they are received by experts in science museums and museum visitors and (3) values in folktales across countries and time periods, through a cross cultural perspective and how these values are received by storytelling experts in fairytale museums and museum visitors. VAST will create a collaborative platform to assist scholars, researchers, artists, museums and educators to curate, re-use and re-purpose this material, re-visiting moral values in the context of modern society. We will combine a storytelling platform with crowdsourcing, by providing a storytelling application that will allow the users to create their own stories and remix the content together with pre-selected tags of values, supporting the continuous consolidation of assets.