Education, game, digital citizenship, creativity and participation explored with media.

Zaffiria is a centre based in Rimini in Italy since 1998, engaged in offering and developing media education in schools and in extra-school time and in the promotion of children’s rights and their social participation through the creative use of media. Since 2009, we are also based in Bellaria-Igea Marina with #Via Luzzatti 15, our Ludoteca (Ludothek), open for families 2 times a week.

We work with schools in in the regions of Emilia-Romagna, Marche, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, and promote and carry out media education courses in various regions of Italy.

Since 2008 we also manage the national centre Alberto Manzi and collaborate with the Corecom, Regional Agency for Communications Legislative Assembly of Emilia-Romagna.

 
 
Our projects
Zaffiria coordinates and is partner of numerous local, national, as well as European projects dealing with media education, creative technology, toolkit production, pedagogical experimentation and teacher training. We also design interventions aimed at the social cohesion of local communities, using tools and languages of art and technology together to make people live positive experiences, actively including, integrating and involving them. Over the years we have worked with older people, asylum seekers, and with associations that deal with specific disabilities. At the moment, one of our biggest national enterprises is the fight against educational poverty of children through creativity, coordinating the project E se diventi Farfalla (translation: But if you become a Butterfly), which involves 140.000 children in 9 Regions of Italy (Emilia-Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardia, Piemonte, Puglia, Sicilia, Veneto, Basilicata, Toscana), funded by the social enterprise Con i Bambini.
Over the years, we were also involved in various European projects, that allowed us to carry on in-depth experiments and to exchange approaches and methodologies with partners from different countries on complex topics such as online hate speech but also on common themes like the interaction of children with technologies in their everyday life.

Some of our current projects:

• Appyourschool
• Migrant Liter@cies
• T@ndem
• Silence Hate

 
 
What we do

Workshops and Ateliers
Designing and creating workshops and ateliers (active workshops), is one of the main activities of Zaffiria that combines the double path of curatorship of the Alberto Manzi Center and of the Master in the Bruno Munari Method. The aim of our ateliers is the promotion and development of media education through the creative use of media, the combination of technological aspects with artistic techniques and the experimentation with different and less stereotyped uses of media and technology, encouraging a more creative and conscious use of technologies.

Training
We offer training courses for teachers (mainly) but also for educators, parents, proposing an active workshop modality for adults too, re-adapted by the need to have the tools to continue an autonomous research after training. We also actively collaborate with universities that offer seminars and workshops to their students.

Pedagogical Resources
Toolkits, manuals or MOOC: our goal is to share the tools we use in projects so that others can reuse and reinvent them.

Installations and Exhibitions
Zaffiria has been collaborating for years with museums, libraries, archives and festivals to promote joint initiatives including: creating workshops for children and families, designing installations – even in urban furniture – carrying out initiatives in the square for the broad involvement of the public, provide training to cultural operators, support the creation of educational material, create specific games.

Websites, Apps and Video Games
We create applications for mobile devices and video games that focus on children and adolescents through the creative and divergent use of technology. Our apps are useful both at home and in the classroom, to learn new things or to know better use the ones we already know.

Italiantoy
Italiantoy comes from 15 years of experience of Zaffiria in media, art and heritage education. Inspired by great artists and educators we design innovative toys with a particular attention to the educational aspect, thinking and testing our products with teachers and children. We rely entirely on local crafts and expertise to create products of great quality.