EUropean LABoratories of Role-Play Gaming (EULabRPG) aims to enhance metacognition, social, and emotional skills of post-primary and tertiary students between the ages of 13-19 years. This project will focus on increasing the importance to be paid to the empowerment of students and their wellbeing, enhancing teachers' ability to mitigate risk factors for mental illness as well as protective abilities. Specifically, the project aims to empower students with emotion recognition and regulation skills, collaboration, communication skills, problem-solving, and teamwork skills. All these competencies can support mental wellness. To achieve its aims, the project foresees leveraging Tabletop Role-Play gaming (TTRPG) activities as educational tools, including metacognition moments, to increase students’ emotional and individual skills and promote an inclusive and supportive school environment.

The project partners attended a face-to-face three-day train-the-trainer event to enhance their understanding of role-playing games and TTRPGs as educational tools. The meeting emphasised the crucial role of the Game Master in educational TTRPGs. The partners received additional training to enhance their understanding of the TTRPGs with a follow-up online training session. This training session provided a new cohort of teachers with an opportunity to experience TTRPGs as educational tools. The teachers took on the role of the players while the project partners acted as Game Masters . These role-play gaming activities will be of benefit to the students, which the partnership believes will make them more resilient against adverse life events.

The project objectives are:
• Place greater emphasis on empowering students, recognizing it as essential for both life and personal skill development
• Empower teachers in social and emotional learning, the empowerment of students’ individual life skills, as well as the ability to carry out TTRPG scenarios
• Promote TTRPG scenarios and methodology as upgraded school activities to recognise and support students’ discomfort.

Results:
During the training event of the EULabRPG project, several outcomes, including project results, will be produced:
• The project will provide participating schools with a dedicated curriculum outlining the methodology, competencies, and supplementary activities.
• A comprehensive training toolkit will be available to help increase the number of trained teaching staff.
• Providing teachers and students with all the necessary tools to carry out the role-play gaming training.
• Teachers and students practice the activities first (see if it’s positive/effective).

Partners:
The partners for the project include: Munster Technological University (MTU), (Ireland), Coordinator, Organisations Consorzio Ro.Ma, (Italy), PASCAL English School Lemesos (Cyprus), Labgdr (Italy), X LO im. I.J. Paderewskiego w Katowicach (Poland), Vardakeios School (Greece).

Find Out More about this project: Website: https://www.eulabrpg.eu/en/

Keywords: Tabletop role play, gaming activities, post-primary, educational tools.