Children@Game.Edu.NATO — Asking a Country’s Children What NATO Means to Them
A NATO 70th-anniversary public diplomacy project that asked roughly 1,500 Macedonian schoolchildren what NATO meant to them, then turned their answers into a book, eight videos, an educational manual, and a nationally distributed board game designed by students themselves.
NATO Public Diplomacy Division · NATO@70 Call for Proposals · Agreement PR 26662Project at a Glance
Objective & Summary
Marking NATO’s 70th anniversary, NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division opened a call for projects reaching the alliance’s “successor generation” — children aged 0 to 17 — through play and education rather than lectures. GAUSS Institute’s winning proposal took the idea further than a typical awareness campaign: rather than teaching children what to think about NATO, it started by asking them, then built everything that followed directly out of their answers.
The project’s own three-phase structure — each phase built on what the previous one produced
Role & Activities of the GAUSS Institute
- Designed and ran the nationwide children’s survey — collecting drawings, filmed interviews and written answers from kindergarten and primary school children across the country on the single question “What does NATO mean to you?”
- Produced eight short videos from the children’s recorded answers (against a target of just one), and curated a printed book of the most interesting drawings and written responses.
- Organised an exhibition of over 250 children’s drawings — an addition beyond the original proposal — and the project’s first public event, in Bitola, with certificates and awards for the most active schools and individuals.
- Analysed the full set of children’s answers to identify the topics where young people most often misunderstand NATO, then wrote and published a 70-question manual explaining what NATO actually does and the benefits of membership.
- Ran an open call for student-designed educational games about NATO, open to teams of students, teachers and parents, and convened the jury that selected winners across several categories.
- Organised the closing event at the Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies — Bitola, presenting the 25 best game concepts and the competition’s award ceremony.
- Finalised, translated and printed the winning board game — in Macedonian, Albanian and English — and distributed 1,000 copies to schools and kindergartens as a lasting teaching tool.
- Built and maintained the project web portal (nato70.mk), publishing every video, drawing, game concept and document in both Macedonian and English, and committed to keeping it online for years after the project’s formal end.
Outputs (Deliverables)
| Deliverable | Target | Achieved |
|---|---|---|
| Video collage of children’s answers | 1 | 8 |
| Printed book of drawings and answers | 300 copies | 300 copies |
| Project web portal | 1 | nato70.mk |
| Submitted children’s game concepts | 10 | 49 |
| Printed winning board game, distributed to schools | 1,000 copies | 1,000 copies |
| Opening event (book & video launch) | 100 participants | 114 participants |
| Closing event (games & awards) | 100 participants | ~130 participants |
| Exhibition of children’s drawings | not planned | 255 drawings |
| Manual, “70 Questions and Answers about NATO” | not planned | 1 manual |
Outcomes
Every single target in the project’s logframe was met or substantially exceeded. The Head of the NATO Liaison Office in Skopje, Col. Zoran Jankovich, personally attended both public events — presenting certificates to schools at the June opening event and, at the October closing event, awarding both the winning student teams and a plaque to GAUSS Institute itself for the project’s successful realisation. The winning game’s translation into Albanian alongside Macedonian and English reflected the project’s genuinely nationwide, multi-ethnic reach.
Significance
Public diplomacy aimed at children usually runs one direction: an institution decides what young people should know, then delivers it. Children@Game.Edu.NATO ran the process in reverse — asking nearly 1,500 children what NATO already meant to them, and only then building the explanatory manual and the teaching game around the actual gaps and misconceptions that surfaced. That the winning teaching tool was designed by students and teachers themselves, not commissioned from an agency, is precisely what gave GAUSS’s proposal its edge over a conventional awareness campaign.
For the GAUSS Institute, this was its first direct agreement with NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division — a different NATO relationship from the Bazaar-funded MOBILNOST and “New Vision” donations — and it drew on the same nationwide schools network and creative-industry skills (video production, translation, board-game design and printing) that GAUSS had built through earlier projects like HIVE.
This project was implemented under an agreement with the NATO Public Diplomacy Division, within the NATO@70 Call for Proposals. The content of this page reflects the work of GAUSS Institute and does not necessarily represent the official position of NATO.