Learning Through
Play-Based
Education
Power up digital citizens: children designing video games to tackle online risks
connects children with games and digital tools that make education more engaging, fostering active, cross-disciplinary discovery learning across 6 European countries.🔎 About the project
PowerUP is a CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values) co-funded project under call CERV-2025-CHILD that brings together six European partner organizations from Portugal, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Romania, and Italy. The project’s core mission is to design, develop, and disseminate a collection of educational card games that address key competencies in child rights, digital safety, and active citizenship.
By combining game-based learning methodologies with curriculum-aligned content, PowerUP enables students aged 8–13 to explore complex topics about digital citizenship.
The project delivers two comprehensive teaching toolkits, a public Game Portal with downloadable and browser-playable games, and a body of research on the effectiveness of game-based learning in secondary education.
🎯 What We Deliver
Project Results
80 Student-Made Game Cards
A vibrant collection of illustrated game cards co-created by children aged 8–13 across six European countries, exploring online safety themes like cyberbullying, privacy, hate speech, and digital kindness.
20+ Child-Designed Video Games
Multilingual library of educational video games designed and built by students aged 8–13. Each game tackles real online risks, from misinformation to grooming, through interactive storytelling and gameplay.
2 Teaching Toolkits
A step-by-step educator guide and a peer-written illustrated handbook for children, two complementary resources designed for teachers, organisations, and students replicate the PowerUP methodology.
📰 Stay updated
Latest Articles
Follow the PowerUP journey: project updates, partner events and resource releases.
Growing Up Online: Why Digital Safety Starts Early
For many children today, being online is part of everyday life. They use the internet to learn, play, chat with friends, watch videos and explore
Children Take the Controller: How Game Design can teach Online Safety
What if the best way to teach children about online dangers wasn’t a lecture or a rulebook, but a video game they built themselves?That’s exactly the idea behind PowerUP, a European project bringing together schools from Portugal, Greece, Poland, and Romania, with digital education experts from Belgium and Italy.