The marathon, or Eduton, is a three day’s immersion program for anyone interested in education, those who want to create their own educational products that make extracurricular activities encouraging, resourceful, productive and rewarding. More than 150 teachers from Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm, Novokuznetsk, Barnaul, Tyumen, Astrakhan, Moscow and St. Petersburg spent the Eduton weekend at NSPU developing their own game projects for teaching activities.

- I’d like to thank the organizers of the event for cool coaches and ideas, this boost of energy and the opportunity to make our dream come true. It’s amazing that everyone can play and speak English non-stop practicing grammar in a relaxed and fun way. It's incredible when you design and create something for the benefit of your profession and students, and then you personally also get praised and noticed by people who say: “Awesome! In production!” – shares her impressions one of the Eduton participants, an English teacher of the “Speak easy” language school Ekaterina Gamalya.

The honorable experts of the marathon, gaming practitioners, psychologists, PhDs, helped the participants redesign their educational programs in a brand-new way.

- Coming up with interesting ideas, connecting the incompatible, optimizing your own resources, gamifying your own project activities - all these are about the pedagogical Eduton "Online like Offline". I am extremely happy that teachers from all over the country took advantage of this opportunity. During these 3 days we saw so many creative ideas that it was difficult to choose the best ones. Many thanks to the experts who helped the participants share their professional cases and development projects, - says the project organizer, head of the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology of Children's Recreation of the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University Elena Vladimirovna Bogdanova.

The Eduton experts held a number of exciting workshops as well. For example, one of them was how to create a bot in a telegram channel. Many participants, who got deeply inspired by the knowledge, made their own products too. The Eklchik is a school chatbot that can share the class schedule, answer questions and much more.

Moreover, the participants upgraded their emotional intelligence skills and practised game pedagogy (a form of educational process that works in hypothetical situations to recreate and acquire social experience in all its manifestations: knowledge, skills, abilities, emotional and evaluative activities). They also learnt more about the creation of board games and phygital products used in education.

In addition to master classes, the marathon held networking sessions for the participants to get to know each other better and later plan their joint projects. In the lobby of the NSPU Technopark, there were expert checkpoints - platforms where one could tell any expert about their game project and get feedback. Each Eduton day was summed up by creative circles. These were feedback activities to share impressions and experience gained during the marathon.

The Eduton winners will receive support from the organizers and experts to finalize and release their games in both printed and electronic formats. There are 18 of such projects. The Eduton participants Ekaterina Gamalya and Yulia Medvedeva received a special prize - certificates to participate in the Youth Pedagogical forum “Lineyka” which is scheduled for November in St. Petersburg.