HandShaKing

Minecraft in education: 10 engaging activities for your kids

Minecraft is still a very successful game after almost 10 years, and this alone is already enough to consider it worthy to be used as a tool for engaging kids in many possible activities. Moreover, Minecraft is so relevant as...

Convergence culture, Umberto Eco and Star Wars :)

Convergence culture is the key-concept explored by Henry Jenkins in his crucial book dating back to 2006. Jenkins finally helped a lot to explain why popular culture (as in comics, fan fictions, blockbuster movies etc… and videogames, of course) is having such an impact in...

Streaming videogames are in da house!

I have seen the future of videogames, and it’s streaming 😀 There has been a lot of buzz online about it lately, after the announcement of Google game-streaming service Stadia. Among the other big players, Apple still seems to be...

Notre Dame of the Assassin’s Creed

Notre Dame could be rebuilt using 3d mappings from videogames - meanwhile gamers worldwide pay tribute posting Assassin's Creed Unity Notre Dame screenshots. Art, landscape and videogames have just started working together.

HOP Online learning: I am on podcast again!

HOP Online Learning is a platform created by the European SALTO Eastern Europe and Caucasus Resource Center. HOP is all about online learning, e-learning and the likes of it: they promote online learning in many different ways and are very...

Bandersnatch: a real storytelling revolution?

I had just finished to write a post in the Italian section of the blog, about the interactive cartoon Minecraft: story mode on Netflix, and the streaming platform started promoting nothing less than a Black Mirror interactive episode: Bandersnatch. Even...

Empowered to empower: a Tool Fair Talk… and more

The European tool fair was created 12 years ago already by Salto Youth Euromed and Good Practices resource centre, as a chance for exchanging Learning Tools and practices and reflecting together on the potential of non formal education. It generated...

Future forecast: digital youth work

Fortune tellers – or future tellers, even worse, always struggle with that question: how everything will look like in some years? I wrote an article for issue #26 of Coyote magazine, starting exactly from here, and talking digital youth work. Coyote is the webzine...

Retrocomputing is not retro

I was 11, maybe 12, at the time. It was Italy in the glittering 80’s. Maybe it was for a long and suffered adolescence about to come, but the worst decade ever in my life, I swear — except for computers. Italy...

Games for a better world: a training course

Games. I wish I could count how much time we spend on them in our life. In my life, surely a lot – and I do not regret a single minute of that time. While I am going back home after...

VR : virtual reality in a cardboard box

VR [as in Virtual Reality] is the new big thing, they say. Honestly, the idea of a 3D computer-generated reality has been a key aspect of cyberpunk culture, back in the 80s, and Wikipedia says the concept could even date...

Digital Youth Work: Dig-it Up!

Digital Youth Work: Dig-It up! is the booklet I wrote together with Joanna Wronska and Raphaela Blassnig in 2017. It tells what we discovered, studied and learnt during two editions of our training course aimed at youth workers / educators /...

Digital YouthWork Sessions podcast n. 1 – it’s me!

I am very honored and grateful to have been interviewed in the first episode of Digital YouthWork Sessions podcast, hosted by my friend Juha Kiviniemi from Verke – I wrote about them here already! We spent 45 minutes chatting about what is...

Christmas tech gifts for kids? 5 tips, tested for you

Gifts, gifts … 10 days to Christmas, are you ready? Have you already bought everything? Or have not you even thought about it yet? 🙂 At this point the children will have already written their letters to Father Christmas, and...

eSports – videogames at the Olympics and more

Will eSports go to the Olympics? Apparently the Olympic Committee is thinking about it, and mentioned it in a recent statement . As foreseeable, such news sparked a mountain of reactions from commentators of a certain level , many of...

InternetFestival : videogame – based learning – #IF2017

InternetFestival is a very serious thing, probably the most serious in Italy about network-related topics and trends. Yet 😀 the organization contacted me and my partner-in-crime Carmine , involving us in the T-Tour section, a series of public workshops during the...