Social polarization is the process of dividing a society or group into two or more distinct and opposing factions. It is characterized by significant distance between groups, high internal homogeneity within each group, and comparable size of competing factions. Polarization can escalate even without deliberate effort, driven by various cognitive mechanisms such as confirmation bias and social factors like homophily. It carries highly negative consequences for democratic processes, including erosion of trust and weakening of electoral legitimacy.

ActIPLEx aims to combat social polarisation among young people by educating them about the dangers of polarisation and increasing their understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the process. With the help of educational games and social simulations, we will create educational experiences for students and a wider audience, as well as open educational resources about polarisation and dialogue to help motivate young people towards positive dialogue in the situations they face in life.

Within ActIPLEx,we will:

• Develop a set of interactive learning experiences in the form of a Massive Open Online Course on Futurelearn, online courses on the University of Tartu and University of Warsaw’s educational platforms
• Design,test, refine, and conduct an interactive game-based workshop on polarisation and dialogue, including educational social simulations
• Implement and promote the workshop format and online courses within the partnership and for a wider audience (4EU+ Alliance,schools)

Within the project we plan to reach out to various audiences, including over 1,000 participants in the MOOC on Futurelearn, over 250 participants in open online courses on partner universities’ platforms and over 200 student participants in the game-based workshop. We will produce a set of Open Educational Resources for teachers: videos,quizzes,texts,social simulation experiments and an educational game and promote those materials during three dissemination workshops for teachers. The game based workshop format will also be tested in 2-4 secondary schools. All courses’ and workshop participants will be better equipped in recognising, understanding and preventing social polarisation.