City Stories project

Everyone at ILC IH Brno is excited about the City Stories project we are running as the lead partner with our friends from Split and Barcelona. For the project we are taking stories from our fantastic regions and turning them into Digital Escape Rooms (DER) to create fun, engaging activities for English language learners.

Good stories are amazing learning tools as they engage the audience and challenge them to think about and understand the worldview they are being presented with. In particular, stories help us both to recognise and give us a sense of belonging to our own culture, and open a window onto other cultures. Stories are cultural treasures.

Furthermore, there is strong demand for teaching and learning resources that are meaningful, motivating, modern and innovative. Our project has been designed to produce resources which meet this demand. We will develop a set of Digital Escape Rooms - on a modern, innovative teaching platform - that will help develop language competencies in learners.  

A Digital Escape Room (DER) is an exciting, interesting and engaging way to collaborate and learn. Typically a DER has a set of tasks that the player, or players, has to complete in order to ‘escape’ the room; for the City Stories project each DER is a sequence of rooms that require solving to escape the whole game. 

Initially the DERs will be telling stories from three iconic regions of Europe, focusing on the main cities within each. Split represents Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast; Moravia is right in the centre of Europe with Brno the cosmopolitan city in its heart; and from Cataluynia there could only be the cultural centre of Barcelona.

The platform we use to host the DERs will also allow other teachers and students to go on to create their own stories and their own learning activities. Our dream is to have City Stories from all over the world connecting people and inspiring them, through culture and language, to explore and better understand the world we share.

The project is funded by the Erasmus+ program (2020-1-CZ01-KA227-ADU-094205).