Urban games as a tool to strengthen literacy skills among prisoners

The Erasmus+ program offers Small Scale Partnership Projects. The so-called small-scale projects, Erasmus+ KA 210, are aimed at less experienced institutions that aim to expand access to the program and enable smaller entities that are usually difficult to reach in the sectors of school education, adult education, vocational education and training, youth and sports, participation in international activities for broadly understood education.

One of such projects was the project entitled “Urban games as a tool to strengthen literacy skills among prisoners”, in which three institutions were involved:

1. „Busola” Socially Excluded Education Association from Poland as the project coordinator.

2. AAPA Penitentiary Center in Tenerife as a partner. (Centro de educación de personas adultas Santa Cruz de Tenerife)

3. Antalya Closed Penitentiary as a partner (Antalya L Tipi Kapali Ceza Infaz Kurumu)

The main goal of our project was, as the name suggests, to strengthen prisoners’ reading and writing skills by creating urban games. The inmates participating in this project took advantage of a package of workshops in various fields, which allowed them to acquire a set of skills, competences and tools necessary to achieve the final common goal: creating several city games that will later serve local communities. Thanks to various workshops, prisoners were able to design urban games in such a way that, once completed, they could be used by a wider audience.

The workshops in which prisoners participated were:

– local history workshops,

– creative writing,

– calligraphy,

– creating rhymes and rapping skills,

– designing and creating city games,

– digital image processing,

– creating drawings and illustrations.

The priorities that motivate us focus on the inclusion of socially excluded and marginalized groups, promoting education among adults whose opportunities for education are reduced or limited. All planned activities were intended for adult prisoners, within which we conducted an informal educational process. Thanks to them, excluded people had access to a wider range of educational activities. Moreover, the final result of our activities (urban games) will be available to a wider audience, which means that we can expect civic engagement at a level that goes beyond prison education.

Urban games are available below in digital format so that anyone who wants to play them can download and use them for free. In this way, a wider audience will be able to learn in an entertaining way the stories, anecdotes and legends related to the cities participating in the project.
The project lasted a total of 20 months, from May 1, 2022 to December 31, 2023. We believe it was very successful. Beneficiaries (prisoners) who took part in educational workshops expanded their competences in the scope in which the workshops were organized. In most cases, the aim was to increase skills in the basics of ‘literacy’. The opportunity to broaden horizons in other areas is also important, such as during workshops on local history.