The aim of this article is to bring you behind the scenes and reveal some of the key InnoSchool innovation aspects. The Serious Game, as a component of the InnoSchool Learning System (ILS), represents its core and the most attractive element, as confirmed by members of territorial Advisory Groups. The game is designed to strengthen high-school students’ social innovation and entrepreneurship spirit by creating awareness about social needs and improving their abilities (creativity, pro-activity, risk-taking and perseverance) as well as entrepreneurial skills in opportunity mapping, business planning, marketing/sales, finance, human resources and project management, social needs analysis, defining vision and mission, detecting key resources & key activities, listing stakeholders, defining beneficiaries and segments, etc.

The Serious Game is developed as a responsive web-based application. At the beginning of the game, each student team chooses one out of 6 social themes to explore and, from that point, the chosen social theme serves as a background for the educative story. These 6 social themes/needs (caring for an aging population, shift of society towards environmental responsibility, inclusion of excluded groups, child welfare, workforce migration/brain drain and disadvantages & challenges in peripheral and rural areas) were identified during extensive research activities undertaken by the InnoSchool project partners in their countries, at the beginning of the project.

The learning process is divided into several modules. Each module will consist of two parts that merge together in an entertaining learning environment: traditional classroom activities led by teachers allow students to discuss and reflect on real-life situations; digital part - a web-based Serious Game - provides educational input (theoretical background, quiz questions, other logical tasks and open questions) in an entertaining way (animated story attracting attention of the player towards social challenges).

The game will have two levels of difficulty - basic and advanced. The basic level will include quiz questions and other logical tasks. The advanced level will, in addition, include open questions requiring more complex answers and special templates to be filled within the application in order to describe ideas, elaborate analyses and describe value propositions, key activities and possible revenues. Students are continuously informed on how they stand in comparison to their peers. Total points for quiz questions will be visible at the end of each module. Progress of individual players will be visible during the game as well as the percentage of completion of all tasks of the current module.

The user can link the game account to appropriate social media channels with the possibility to use it for sign-in. After finishing a module, players have the possibility to directly share their progress and standings on social media.