What’s in an A? Alphabetic diversity throughout Europe (LS-ME-794)

If you’re able to read this blog-post, you’re familiar with the ‘Latin’ alphabet. But maybe, your mother language is written using other letters than just A, B, C. Some European languages ‘added’ some extra letters, as ç (French), æ (Danish), and ø (also Danish), but other European languages use a completely different alphabet. This alphabetic diversity was the starting point for us (Willemijn Zwart & Kyra Nijenhuis, educational developers at Komvoor) in developing the learning scenario ‘What’s in an A?’
Phase 1: Brainstorming

Don’t you love this first phase of almost any project? Concept development is by far our favourite aspect of educational development. Sadly, it’s most of the time only one day ‘the magic happens’, but what a fun we’ve had! At first we had very spectacular ideas, with escape rooms, challenges and lots of physical materials. We wanted to combine literacy with creativity and add a gamified element in the learning scenario, but we also put usability throughout Europe high on our wishlist. This was a big fat ‘needs to have’, so many spectacular elements were to be deleted.
At this point Kyra entered the room. She is working as an intern in our educational development group and has experience as a primary school teacher assistant, and as a designer, she was full of visual and creative ways to combine the educational content with appealing designs and formats, that would also ‘work’ digitally, so schools and museums in other countries should be able to use the learning scenario as well.
Phase 2: Defining the content

On the website of Europeana, we selected over 200+ sources that showed alphabets from all over the world. We had more than 12 alphabets to choose from. At this point we realised that for the age group we wanted to target (10-12 years) we needed to be more selective. So we chose to work with only four alphabets: Greek, Cyrillic, Hungarian and Latin. And instead of all the letters, we selected 16 letters from each alphabet that corresponded to similar phonemes.
Here, our co-working group within the Europeana museum educator group became an amazing asset. Searching for Greek sources in Europeana for example was challenging for us, as we are not so familiar with nor the language nor the alphabet ourselves. So thank you so much kind co-workers in our educator group, for searching sources with us and sharing your knowledge and insights!
We used post-its on our office wall to structure all the knowledge, alphabets and learning goals, to work towards an effective concept for the learning scenario, a.k.a. a big table with what to do in which phase of the learning scenario and what assets should be produced.
Phase 3: Let’s sketch! Assets production

Once the entire learning scenario was written, we had a clear list of assets that should be produced. We needed letter-cards for all four of the alphabets, a visual key to recognise each of the alphabets, a bibliography with links and QR-codes so participants could find the Europeana sources with ease, and a step-by-step visual guideline for the creative task at the end of the learning scenario.
Here, Kyra started to sketch and design the assets, thinking of clever visual ways to address each of the alphabets. For example: we choose to use a bell peper for the Hungarian alphabet, because bell pepers are typical for Hungary and the Hungarian word for bell peper (paprika) is one of the few Hungarian words that spread through other languages as well (not in English, though).
Phase 4: Troubles in paradise

At this point, we came up to a nasty problem. Our designing programmes had difficulties with the different alphabets. They weren’t all known in all fonts, so we couldn’t easily design with a pretty, attractive font for the age group 10-12 years, and using different fonts for the different alphabets would distract too much (for example, letters that do look similar would still look different because of the different fonts).
The image above shows how we tried to draw the letters by hand, to solve this problem. But as you can see, these letters don’t look professional enough to be used in the assets.
Luckily, one of our colleagues came up with the idea to use a drawing pad, so we could design the letters ourselves in Adobe Illustrator, in a similar style for all four alphabets. And here, Kyra did her magic, and we had 4 x 16 letters in a beautiful vector file, to be used in all the assets we were working on!
Phase 5: Try-out

Kyra was able to use her contacts in primary education in our region to find an enthusiastic teacher for the first try-out of the learning scenario. This was so much fun! The kids had a great time, and were full of surprise about the fact that other alphabets than their own Latin alphabet exist! Key learning goal: check.
We were able to make some smaller adjustments to the learning scenario based on the try-out, and thereby we were able to finish the learning scenario.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
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CC BY-SA 3.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Europeana 1914-1918.