Yconic boosts energy literacy among youth

As four forces reshape our societies, today's youth need engaging, reliable information on how each – and on how they interact.

🌍 Climate Change | ⚡ Clean Energy Transition | 💻 Digitalisation | ⚖️ Social Justice

Yconic is a wiki-based platform designed to help youth grasp key aspects of these complex challenges. It also helps them develop communication skills that prepare them to be advocates, activists and actors.

Critically, Yconic also gives teachers Lesson Plans, ideas and tools to engage students.

Over its Pilot phase (2024/25), students and teachers from schools in three countries – Bulgaria, Italy and Spain – tapped into Yconic to learn, create and collaborate. A post-Pilot survey finds that 86.5% of students rated their Yconic experience at 3 or higher (on a scale of 5). Teachers report that it made lesson planning easy and boosted their confidence in topics for which they lack in-depth knowledge.

As teachers prepare for the 2025/26 year, Yconic is preparing to go global! Scroll down for more details...

Join the Yconic movement for 2025/26!

Yconic is excited to invite teachers and students aged 12-16 to join the project's global Roll-Out in the next academic year (2025-2026)!

Here's a quick recap of what Yconic offers, demonstrating that is highly dynamic for students and super-efficient for teachers.

Cool content and opportunities for youth

All content prepared by the Yconic applies principles of effective storytelling to help youth gradually build up knowledge of complex topics. The combination of journalistic writing, links to online videos and infographics, and interactive elements encourages them to 'dig deeper'.

✔️ Super-informative articles, co-authored by experts and journalists, to take students deeper and deeper into each topic, systematically building their knowledge and understanding.

✔️ Quizzes and questionnaires that test their knowledge acquisition and let them express their ideas, opinions and concerns or ask related questions.

✔️ Chat Rooms to interact with their peers from around the World.

✔️ Communication tools and training that prompts students to create and add new content reflecting local aspects of these global forces.

By joining Yconic, students will:

✔️ Contribute to a growing body of content by uploading materials they create, individually or in group work.

✔️ Strengthen a global movement in which youth take the lead in shaping a new, socially just era!

🏅 All students will receive a Certificate of Participation from Yconic.

Tools and support for teachers

Based on inputs from teachers participating in the development of Yconic from Day 1, the Team has created tools that build knowledge and boost confidence in teaching complex topics.

✔️ Ready-to-use Lesson Plans guide teachers through key concepts and provide ideas for in-class and individual activities, saving preparation time.

✔️ Access to extensive resources about each topic on the Yconic platform.

✔️ Opportunity to tap into the expertise of Yconic creators and join a network of peers using the platform.

By joining Yconic, teachers will:

• Help students grasp the connections between global challenges and their own daily lives.
• Encourage interactive and interdisciplinary learning on STEM-related topics.
• Help students develop critical thinking skills about today's key issues.
• Build communications skills to serve diverse aims (e.g. engage, inform, empower) and across different media.
• Contribute valuable feedback to shape the final Yconic platform before it goes live as an open access tool in September 2026.

Relevant subjects:Across the Pilot phase, teachers have built Yconic Lesson Plans and content into diverse classes and curriculum. This creates opportunity to link current affairs to subjects students sometimes feel are irrelevant.

🗺️ Geography | 📚 History | 🗣️ Language Acquisition | 🏛️ Civic Education | 💻 Computer Science | ➕ and more (cross-curricular opportunities available!)

Anticipated engagement:

Yconic Lesson Plans are designed to be flexible, giving teachers resources they can apply in a systematic way across several weeks or 'dip into' to augment curriculum requirements. To give students a truly 'Yconic' experience, we propose doing a deep dive of one subject over four weeks.

📅 Commitment: Minimum of 2 hours/week for 4 weeks of project engagement (between October 2025 - June 2026).

🏅 All teachers will receive a Certificate of Participation from Yconic.

How to join Yconic

Keen to help and inspire youth to lead a new, socially just era? Drop us an email to join our mailing list, sign up for a webinar or arrange for a meeting: marilyn.smith [at] en-act.org.

What Yconic will learn from youth

A very cool aspect of Yconic is that it will use advanced digital tools to learn how youth learn. Yconic will capture data from User activity on the platform, then apply artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing to analyse two things:

• progress in learning about the four topics
• how students gather information, interact and create new content.

This will help Yconic respond to what youth want to learn and continually improve the Platform.

Who is behind Yconic?

The Yconic platform and content have been developed by a consortium of Project Partners in France, Germany, India, Italy and Spain. The project is funded by the European Commission, through the Erasmus+ project, under which it is officially known as ‘Global Action for Young Energy Leaders’ (GAYEL).