We started by developing a strategy for advertising and organising the writing competition, categorising and judging entries. We elaborated four categories, prose, poetry, argumentative and analytic writing and rating criteria for each category, such as persuasion, originality or analytic quality. The texts had to have a European subject and the students were allowed to combine different languages.

A detailed strategy for evaluating the entries and calculating the score they achieved was also developed. Then, we created a prompt for the creative texts, both textual and visual, and decided to drop the non-creative categories to make the process more effective. This simplified the understanding of our advertisements and added to the interest in the competition.

We advertised in our school channels, amplified by in-class-advertisement provided by students and staff. The students had time to write their entries over Christmas and in January.

The winner was a student from 6th grade who wrote a prose story. It proved that the prompt and the resources at our school sparked interest in Europe. As a prize, she received a book gift card. The number of people we reached is not applicable, as we did reach the whole secondary school (about 300 students), but not everyone send in their work.

(Note that the evidential documents and the prompt are in German, as we are a German school. The documents containing “Vox Europae” were used in developing the categories and rating criteria, while “Writing competition_European Ambassadors” was the final prompt).