Youthpass Island 2.0 (or how being stuborn has also its upsides)

EVS and volunteerism should not be just about sharing experiences but also sharing learning processes. Sharing methods and tools can help us to do a better job, to reach other places, and often, save us a lot of time. And since we have a Youth Exchange coming soon I needed to choose materials to use.

Youthpass Island a game that allows us to introduce Youthpass and its competences while having some fun. Each key competence is an island and each team needs to perform some tasks in order to fill their “YOUTHPASS-PORT” with all 8 key competencies. This is a “learning-by-doing” activity where the main aspects of Youthpass are addressed and discussed during the game and the debriefing. I have used it before, while facilitation a session in an on-arrival seminar for a short-term EVS group. This tool was developed in 2010 and 7 years later it’s still a very effective tool. The only downside of it is its visual presentation since the graphics are outdated.

To facilitate a session about these subjects is always a challenge since it can be very hard to catch people attention. In situations like this, all details counts and we all know that “books are judged by their covers”. The visual presentation it’s the first contact that a group has with an activity and for sure first impressions influence the level of engagement. And I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

So, I decided to fresh up a bit the look of the activity. I found some new pictures to use as “task cards”. But, as we say in Portugal, work is like cherries: you pull one and a bunch of them come out. After finding new images I just realize that a sheet with an image and some instructions doesn’t really look like a task card. While reading, and recalling the previous experience, I thought that some challenges could be slightly changed.  I started to search for other challenges for each key competence that could make people engage more.  Everything seemed better now, so I opened the dice to print it and, obviously, it had the old images. For sure it could be: they needed to match, so I redesigned the dice. Well, since I went that far, why not apply the same changes to the youthpass-port and leave all parts of the tool equally renovated?

And since I believe it's easier to have all the information in the same place, I decided to make a "ready-to-print" version of the activity. Who knows, it might be useful in the future ;)