Youth Hiking in the Digital Age

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Date/time
Date(s) - 30/09/2019 - 29/09/2021
All day

Locality
Slovakia, Poland, Romania

Project type

Selected participants


We organized several international and local tours, where we took pictures,  filmed and created digital maps using a drone and other digital technologies. We collaborated on the project together with partners from Romania and Poland.

Photos from our events

More information about the project:

Hiking, especially in the environments of natural beauty and cultural significance, is a valuable form of free time activity, raising curiosity of the world, offering new encounters and promoting healthy lifestyle. Regrettably, such experience is shared by relatively small numbers of young people. We believe it makes sense to foster more interest in such activities. Young people’s engagement in the digital world can possibly provide a pathway to attract more young people to outdoor explorations as this is the area of almost universal appeal among youth.

Therefore, the idea was to organise workshops on technologies that can encourage more young people to venture into outdoor explorations – aerial photography, digital mapping and filmmaking. The workshops were combined with field explorations of some mountain ranges in the Carpathian Arc which links Poland, Slovakia and Romania.

This overall project translates into more specific steps that aim to:

– Organise workshops on aerial photography, filmmaking and digital mapping that take the participants from their screens to explorations of the countryside
– Identify trails leading through sites of cultural and natural interest in the Carpathian ranges where we are based
– Involve young participants in hiking together on selected trails and sharing the coverage of their expeditions through photos, films and illustrated maps
– Facilitate intercultural encounters of the young participants across the partnership through online and onsite exchange
– Build a wider youth network around shared interests in digital technology and hiking on the foundation laid during these first encounters
– Distil the best workshop scenarios and approaches and present them in a publication that can encourage similar follow-up initiatives in other youth organisations

Activities and outputs:

– Workshops introducing technologies for exploratory mountain hiking:

Digital mapping. Participants created online maps of selected trails and annotated/illustrated them. T

Aerial photography. Participants learnt how to operate a drone and take photos/films from an aerial perspective.

Mountain filmmaking. Participants learnt how to edit photos and clips into digital narratives giving deeper insights into their explorations. 

– Each round of workshops were connected with hiking trips in the Carpathian mountains in Poland, Slovakia and Romania to explore together places of particular interest: cultural and natural. 

PUBLICATION about project is available here: digiHIKE Publication

Website of the project: https://www.thewaywehike.eu/

Fb group of the project: https://www.facebook.com/groups/704078570085949/

Fb page of the project: https://www.facebook.com/TheWayWeHike/