Procedure

This task consists of four parts.

In the first part, participants are reminded of the definition provided by the European expert group by means of a short input.

In the second part, participants work in three small groups on the fields of work of digital youth work:

• Digital media and technology as a tool
• Digital media and technologies as an activity
• Digital media and technologies as content

Each group should design a terrible offer for their topic area. These worst-practice examples should do everything wrong that can be done wrong. The negative examples are then presented to the whole group. From this, the group works together to derive the quality criteria that should apply to digital youth work. These criteria are recorded in a list.

In the third part, the groups research a best practice project and present it to the group. The presentation should answer the following questions:

• Which of the three areas of digital youth work does your example fall into?
• Why did you choose this example?
• What is particularly well implemented in it?
• What three points make this a youth work project?
• What three points are particularly successful in the digital implementation?

In the fourth part, the list of quality criteria from the first part of this exercise is compared with the findings from the best practice presentations and completed.

Preparation

• It is advisable to research best practice projects yourself in advance so that you can point groups that are having problems with their research in the right direction. You can find a few examples under interesting sources below.
• It is useful to familiarize yourself with the definition of the European expert group and other possible definitions of digital youth work in preparation. You can find a brief overview and translation by us here: What is digital youth work?

Notes on moderation

• The negative example is usually a lot of fun for the participants–the more exaggerated and funny, the clearer the criteria become.
• When researching best practice examples, it is advisable to provide participants with a selection of good sources so that they can discover new things for themselves.
• Here you can find the document from the expert group that we refer to several times in this exercise: Developing digital youth work

Interesting sources

• Hybrid youth work: Statement on opportunities, obstacles, and good practice approaches
• Use of Discord in youth work by the Center for Youth Media Culture in North Rhine-Westphalia Discord in child and youth work
• Jugend Hackt About Jugend hackt – Jugend hackt
• Tincon About TINCON
• Labs4Future
• Stronger with games
• Kiez:story Real stories from the neighborhood
• Project level up! : Project – Gaming without borders