We make learning Yconic

Making complex topics accessible for all young students

Climate change, the energy transition, digitalisation and social justice: individually, all are multifaceted challenges that many youth find difficult to understand. In reality, these four forces influence each other, both locally and globally. They also have direct or indirect impacts on social, environmental, economic and geopolitical systems that underpin daily life for people and the planet.

Using a journalistic style, Yconic offers a series of blogs for each topic, gradually leading students into deeper exploration. To reflect learning goals and capacities across a wide age span (12-17 years), the platform has two versions of each blog:

The Basics covers fundamental elements in easy-to-understand language.
In Depth integrates more data and content that promotes critical thinking.

All blogs include links to content – videos, podcasts, animations, etc. – developed by others. This serves to meet the learning needs of different Yconickers, introduce credible online sources and demonstrate that complex ideas can be explained in very creative ways. A vital feature of a wiki platform is that students can opt to ‘auto-translate’ into their mother tongue any content created in English.

To make Yconic both interactive and personally relevant, each blog prompts students to do things such as:

Do a Data dive to understand how facts and figures support the content.
Investigate further, with the aim of learning about local aspects of the global picture.
Have your say by sharing thoughts, experiences and questions with peers from around the world.
Act now to encourage ideas of how to become changemakers.

Additionally, each blog ends with a quiz to assess comprehension and encourage self-expression.

Building communications skills

Yconic is designed to take youth from ‘learning’ to ‘telling’ and/or ‘doing’. Together, blogs and Lesson Plans prompt students to create content to tell their own stories, report on local problems or solutions, or develop an advocacy campaign. In the platform’s ‘Creative Zone’, Yconickers can access training content that will help them apply skills in storytelling, writing, journalism, or photography and video.

Additional content explains how to plan and execute an advocacy campaign for change and examines how the combination of policy, law and regulation shape societies.

What is Advocacy?

Yconickers leading local change

In 2024/25, students from pilot schools in Bulgaria, Italy and Spain created outstanding content across all four themes, investigating local aspects of global challenges and featuring effective solutions.

Climate change
Energy transition
Digitalisation: Digital device use among Yconickers and their networks (survey underway)
Social justice

Yconickers at Institut Montgros (Spain) led a particularly notable action in the spring of 2025. To boost social cohesion in the surrounding neighbourhood, they organised a community dinner – which was attended by more than 200 people!

Teachers feel empowered

Yconic was inspired, in part, by studies showing that many teachers feel they lack knowledge of these four subject areas, particularly as online resources often present conflicting ideas. Lesson Plans in the Teacher Zone provide links to relevant Yconic blogs and to additional background material, as well as definitions of unfamiliar terms. In turn, they suggest questions for in-class discussions and activities, or assignments for group or individual work. To date, Yconic is being used across diverse subject areas: geography, science, civic studies, science, mathematics, languages, etc.

Ms. Asya Bogoeva, a geography teacher at 138 High School for Western and Eastern Languages "Prof. Vasil Zlatarski" (Sofia, Bulgaria), describes how the Yconic platform prepares teachers and engages youth.

Teacher Feedback on Yconic, Asya Bogeva, Bulgaria

Mining Yconic data to analyse learning

During the pilot phase (2024-26), Yconic is analysing how students use, learn from and interact on the platform. When first joining, students complete a quiz to assess their baseline knowledge of the four themes. Repeating the quiz later demonstrates the level of knowledge growth.

In turn, their inputs – e.g. quiz responses, forum engagement, recordings of class or group discussions, and content created – become data points for analysis using natural language processing (NLP). A form of artificial intelligence (AI), NLP enables computers to analyse, interpret and make sense of human language. By examining what students write, share and discuss on the platform, NLP helps researchers interpret how what students understand, how they feel and how their thinking evolves

Key achievements to date

Working closely with teachers and students, Yconic has built up an impressive body of content, including a growing archive of works created by students.