This PBL activity will give to the participants the occasion to explore the city of Palermo through a street art walking tour and through the Augmented Reality technique available in BePart app. They will discover new graffiti through the hidden corners of the city and will have fun looking for all the animations and the histories available in the app. The activity will give participants the opportunity to discover the city centre from a new perspective, acquire information about street art and raise awareness of the cultural heritage of the place through a thematic walk.

Participants will experience the new methodology of Augmented Reality that will stimulate their creative thinking using digital tools to explore the city and possibly become, in the future, digital content creators. This innovative way to interact with reality easily connects citizens and public spaces, and in this case, makes street art accessible, raising participants’ awareness of the street art value and history and encouraging its preservation among youth.

By exploring the city, young people will learn the name of the streets, will discover local graffiti and their artists and they will interact with the local community to find the places marked on the map. This will give the possibility to feel more integrated into the community and become more familiar with the spaces of the city. On the other side, this will impact also the community itself because it will benefit from the positive and critical thinking that participants will develop and from the fostered awareness and familiarity with the city and local people. Moreover, this digital and creative interaction with the places will stimulate, in a long-term view, young people’s minds, encouraging them to be proactive in the community and to share their vision of urban spaces, giving an impulse to their requalification and to their transformation in smart cities.

Finally, participants will gain and foster soft skills and social competencies such as cooperation, management and leadership skills, self-confidence, critical and creative thinking, communication, observation, orientation and time-keeping skills.

Designing a meaningful Place-Based Learning activity

1. Deciding on a setting

The activity will take place in Palermo city centre and will follow the places of the centre that are marked on the map of the BePart app (more details below).

It is important to check in advance if all the graffiti reported on the map are extant and if the Bepart app is still working with each of them.

The participation to the activity is free.

2. Choosing a trainer

The trainer leading the activity should be a youth worker who is familiar with the city of Palermo, who is able to speak Italian to interact fluently with the local participants, and who has basic digital skills in order to explain the app and its functions.

He will have to explore the app in advance and test it in the city centre, following the map.

3. Description of the activity

Duration of the activity: 3 hours and 30 minutes

Agenda:
1. Introduction to the PBL activity (1 hour)
2. Street art walking tour (1 hour and 30 minutes)
3. Sharing results and final evaluation (1 hour)

Preparation:
The only requirement to take part in the activity is to be provided with a smartphone or a tablet.

Introduction (1 hour):

The youth worker introduces the activity by presenting Bepart app – the Public Imagination Movement – able to transform the city into an exhibition space by adding an “invisible” layer every citizen can experience thanks to augmented reality (AR).

Every participant is asked to download the Bepart – The Public Imagination Movement application, available on the IOS and Android stores. Through the latter, participants are able to enjoy animations in urban spaces and create and install their digital content too.

Once the application is open, it is possible to choose Palermo town and get the map of the city with blue placemarks. The participants can choose then a destination from those on the map, reach it and the magical experience begins. By pointing at the image with the smartphone, the street artwork will animate with new shapes, sounds, and colors.

It is also possible to use GPS: by activating the location, the application will show the points of interest on the map.

The participants can also take photos directly from the app and immortalise the emotion experienced.
Finally, through the application participants can also read the history and discover the meaning of the artworks.

Street art walking tour (1 hour and 30 minutes)

Participants, equipped with a smartphone or a tablet, with the app already downloaded and explored, can start the Street art walking tour to discover the city of Palermo through street art and digital tools. They can reach as many places as possible marked on the map, but at least they have to discover 5 graffiti.
Once arrived in front of the artwork, participants have to frame the subject through Bepart application and observe what happens within the smartphone/tablet’s screen, interacting thus with the augmented reality.

In each graffiti they have to take note of:
– The address of the street
– The name of the artist
– What is the subject doing within the augmented reality
– The meaning or/and the explanation of the street artwork

Sharing results and final evaluation (1 hour)

Participants return to the base and share their results with the trainer.
They show photos of the graffiti taken during the walking tour and explain to the trainer the respective location, the name of the artist, the history, and the meaning.
Under the trainer’s guidance, they reflect on their learning outcomes (see evaluation part below).

4. Evaluation

Before starting the activity, participants will be asked by the trainer if they know anything already about street art and street artists in Palermo, if they noticed some graffiti by walking through the streets of the centre and if they know their meaning. This will help to evaluate the participants’ prior knowledge about the topic and their acquaintance of the urban spaces.
At the end of the activity, once the participants will be back from their walking tour and will have shared the collected information with the group and the trainer, a final evaluation to assess their knowledge and their skills will be done.

Below are some questions that can be asked to participants either verbally or in writing through a questionnaire (to be prepared in advance):
1. Did you like the activity? (On a scale of 1 to 5)
2. Have you ever paid attention to street art? (Yes/Not)
3. Have you ever experienced Augmented Reality? (Yes/Not)
4. Which is your favorite graffiti? (Open question)
5. Share the most useful thing about this activity
6. Is there anything you would change?
7. To what extent the activity helped you to become more familiar with the city? (On a scale of 1 to 5)
8. Has the activity inspired you to act? (On a scale of 1 to 5)
9. If so, how? (Open question)

5. Follow up

This PBL activity can have a long-term impact on the participants and the community itself. Hopefully, participants will be pleasantly impressed by the surprise effect the augmented reality creates on the graffiti, and possibly they will share this discovery with their peers, by involving other young people with a domino effect.

Moreover, the next step of this PBL experience could be to encourage participants and youth workers to become active creators of PBL activities and to build their own curriculum focusing on the aspects they prefer, allowing thus a transfer of expertise that will impact the participants’ civic engagement and therefore the local community.