Sport Education for Active and Responsible Citizenship through Health caring

Background The SEARCH project - Sport Education for Active and Responsible Citizenship through Health caring - aimed at training young European citizens and proposing an intervention intended to enhance and disseminate sport culture. The training and educational activities implemented had the objective of increasing young people's awareness on the importance of sport-related issues, resulting in behaviours focused on wellbeing, inclusion, and full citizenship. Objectives Main objectives of the SEARCH project have been: enhancing the educational value of sport activities, encouraging sport practice to control national health costs, making sport a force for social inclusion, improving economic benefits related to sport, and contributing to turn cities into "smart-sport cities". These objectives were reached by producing and using the four project outputs: SEARCH Open Portal, SEARCH eLearning course and mobile application, SEARCH handbook (in seven languages). Implementation Project implementation included five main phases: 1. Schools and sport organisations involvement; 2. Online student preliminary survey on the SEARCH Open Portal; 3. Study and production activities related to the implementation of the project intellectual outputs; 4. Student education and teacher training activities; 5. Online student post-survey with validation, dissemination, and exploitation of all project results. Achievements Project results exceeded what initially expected despite the arising of Covid-19 pandemic at its beginning. Involvement and transfer of knowledge regarded 143 teachers, sport tutors and educators (only 50 were initially planned) and 4.260 students from different school levels or educational contexts (only 1.000 were initially planned). Quality control, assessment and validation activities confirmed the efficacy of the work implemented, both at the level of internal process and external impact.