Zaffiria is a center based in Rimini in Italy, engaged since 1998 in the field of media education and digital creativity in formal and non-formal education. Zaffiria also manages the national Centre Alberto Manzi, based at the Legislative Assembly of the Region Emilia Romagna, produces multimedia materials dedicated to children and teenagers (apps, e-books, video games, blog, dedicated website) and is specialized on the Bruno Munari Method. With the Bruno Munari Method Zaffiria started the project Italiantoy: educational games and educational materials for schools, sold in France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Italy.
Digital Manifesto
Education, gaming, digital citizenship, creativity and participation explored with the media.
At Zaffiria we ask ourselves how we can reach these objectives in our projects, ateliers, training, walks in the web between old and new media, between the analogical and the digital – to educate, participate, create, think and play!
With the goal to promote children’s rights and their social participation through an active, critical and above all creative use of media.
How we work
Educational project development is at the heart of our activities. Digital ateliers, Toolkits, Manuals, MOOCs: our goal is to share the tools we produce and use in projects, so that others can reuse and reinvent them. We work with children and adolescents of all ages in school and extra-school, develop and implement teacher trainings, create interactive spaces and installations and develop apps and video games that show children a creative and divergent use of technology.
Who we work with
In recent years our main activity has been to collaborate with schools, teachers and educators to promote a greater knowledge of digital media education, which we consider essential since early childhood. Often these activities are carried out within projects born with specific objectives: App your School, E se diventi farfalla, Voice, Steamulate Your School, are just some of the most recent.
E se diventi farfalla
[transl: What if you become a butterfly]
A cultural and educational project, selected by the social enterprise Con i Bambini as part of the Fund for combating educational poverty among minors, which experiments in 9 Italian regions (Emilia-Romagna, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Lombardy, Piedmont, Apulia, Sicily, Veneto, Basilicata, Tuscany) with creativity as a resource for combating poverty. Aim of the project is to make schools in the selected areas to points of reference for families also during extracurricular hours: with stable opening hours, services in the winter or summer months according to local needs, local toy libraries, children’s centres, libraries, art galleries and museums, enhance their programming aimed at both children and families. Parents have free access to targeted cultural and educational opportunities, experience educational relationships based on pedagogically relevant methods, participate in public initiatives with visible results (an installation, play materials, play exhibitions…).
App Your School
Promoting youth creativity through the development of “digital ateliers”, starting from the pedagogical approach of the teacher Alberto Manzi and the artistic/design approach of Bruno Munari; supporting the development of the school as a place to imagine, think and “prototype” the future are the two main objectives of the project concluded in August 2019 and implemented in 8 European countries: Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal and Turkey. The project helped us to develop the format “digital atelier”, which was adapted to the Kindergarten with the publication Carta, Forbici e APP (translation: Paper, Scissors and Apps), awarded with the BELMA (Best European Learning Materials) Gold Award 2020 at the Frankfurt Book Fair.