Learning from the initiatives and best practices of other organisations and heritage venues can also be a great way to get ideas of how to add activities for youth to event programmes. 

From gamification and creative activities to engage children, through to networking and training opportunities for young adults, this article particularly looks at how digital technologies are being used by young people to explore and promote cultural heritage. 

Engaging through interactivity

Interactivity is one of the benefits of digital technologies and can be used to supplement visitor information and make it more engaging. Gamification projects to enhance youth visits to cultural heritage sites include one at Glastonbury Abbey in the south of England, where children aged 9-14 can explore the ruins and discover more about its history using an augmented reality app called Glastonbury Stories. Location-based gameplay allows the children to solve clues provided by historic characters including monks, pilgrims, cooks and gardeners in order to collect artefacts which can then be examined in 3D. 360° virtual reality at four key scenes also allow the building to be seen as it appeared in the later middle ages, giving a more immersive idea of the scale of the site and how it can be visually reconstructed using archaeological research. Another project using VR to explore the past is V4+V, a virtual train journey supported by a European Heritage Days Stories grant. The project aims to allow young people to re-discover abandoned stations and railroads in Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Serbia using digital technology to travel through space and time. 

Encouraging creative approaches

Digital formats and approaches are increasingly enabling young people to visualise and document their cultural heritage in creative ways. This is particularly being encouraged by the Erasmus+ European Stories project which is developing training resources to help participants promote local cultural heritage stories through tourism. The European Stories Digital Toolbox includes a list of 23 digital tools which can be used for storytelling and virtual tourism, and which are accessible to young people at low or no cost. Platforms include those for making heritage stories in formats from video games and animation to audio and photography. One project which used this toolbox is an audio tour for Abbey Village in Galway, Ireland which recorded the stories of locals to make an app-based audio walking tour, allowing visitors to discover the history of the area via their smartphones. Another project focussing on encouraging youth to get involved in their cultural heritage is the New Wave initiative, an annual training and development programme designed to help young adults develop innovative events for Heritage Open Days in England. This year, one of the organisations taking part has been encouraging people aged 18-25 to make films based on their concepts of heritage in the North East of England, with the top ten selected by a youth panel for a special cinema screening open to the public as part of the festival.

Providing platforms for young voices

While digital platforms such as social media are widely used by young adults, The European Heritage Days website provides a specific space for children aged 6-17 to share their views and become ambassadors of heritage through the Young European Heritage Makers initiative. This competition encourages participants to explore their perceptions of cultural heritage and encourages activities and projects which allow the participants to express and share their understanding of heritage topics which matter to them. The projects result in a creative output such as a picture, video or written story which can be submitted to the website, presenting the children’s ideas to a wide audience. Published stories include a comic book written by a group of girls in Armenia focussing on the stories of lesser-known female heroines in traditional epic poetry, and a narrative telling the story of a fictional character discovering the importance of appreciating and enhancing their culture in Italy. Other projects have directly used digital technologies as part of their project, such as this video telling the history of Budva in Montenegro in the context of young people recalling their own experiences of living in the area in the modern day, and a short film based on the archaeological site at Kučar Hill in Slovenia which is now also available for visitors to watch as part of the permanent exhibition at a local museum. Alongside these examples, there are 540 Heritage Makers projects to be explored on our website showing the unique perspectives of young people from across Europe!

Facilitating networking opportunities

Amongst young heritage professionals, virtual meetings can be used as a way to network, share information and learn from each other, and can facilitate remote participation and international collaboration. One example is the Lived-in Heritage project, which saw students from three architecture schools combine on-site workshops with online meetings, allowing contributors from Romania, Scotland and Ukraine to connect across borders and present their findings and ideas. Another networking opportunity utilising digital technologies was HeritageHack, an online hackathon furthering the work of the European Heritage Days Story ‘Idrija: How the Young are Upgrading its Heritage’. The hackathon first took place in 2020 and challenged participants to find solutions for the digitization of museums and galleries and the virtual implementation of festivals in the mining town of Idrija in western Slovenia. The event has since been repeated, with the most recent edition bringing participants of different ages together to consider how to interpret mining traditions for Gen Z in the 21st century. 

Other articles on our website can also offer further ideas. More organisations with youth programmes are explored in ‘How Youth are Preserving Cultural Heritage’, while ideas and approaches suggested for previous European Heritage Days themes can be discovered in ‘Living Heritage Explored by European Heritage Days Stories’ and ‘Sustainable Heritage Events and Competitions for Children’.