MIGRation pATterns in Europe: Geomatics and gamification techniques to raise the awareness of European citizens on migration flows

The enormous migratory flows in the European Union and in the Mediterranean area are influencing the lives of people residing in the hosting countries. Nevertheless, the real magnitude of this phenomenon often remains unknown to citizens and can generate erroneous perceptions. MIGRation pATterns in Europe (MIGRATE) is a Web Mapping application whose goal is to educate and raise the awareness of citizens on this topic. To our best knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply in a modern way the methods and tools of Geomatics to migration-related themes. MIGRATE was developed within the MYGEOSS project of the European Commission-Joint Research Center (JRC), which has received funding from the Horizon 2020 Programme. Completely based on open data and open source technologies and designed with a gamification approach, MIGRATE engages players to learn while playing a map-based trivia game. The architecture of the application is based on the Django framework and makes use of a PostgreSQL database for the server side. The client side is built through HTML5, CSS3 and Bootstrap and makes use of OpenLayers for map management and jQuery for the interface. The analysis of the players’ answers clearly shows how their awareness of migration-related issues overall increased after playing several times to MIGRATE.