Scaffold: a card game to revolutionise teaching

What is Scaffold?

Scaffold is an innovative card game that helps teachers design engaging lessons and develop digital competences. It provides practical tools for educators to integrate digital skills into everyday teaching, making learning more interactive and inclusive.

Scaffold consists of a deck of 102 cards, created to support educators in designing learning activities and guiding them step-by-step – from planning to assessment.

What is Scaffold for?

Scaffold makes European competence frameworks simple and easy to use for teachers — and more broadly, for all educators. It combines meaningful learning activities for learners with essential knowledge of what each competence entails, structured through instructional and assessment design prompts. (full guide & PowerPoint presentation). 

Competence frameworks underpinning Scaffold

Scaffold is based on the European competence frameworks for:  

• Digital competences,
• Entrepreneurship competences,
• Sustainability competences,
• Personal, social and learning-to-learn competences. 

The game shows how the development of these competences can be addressed comprehensively in both formal and non‑formal learning contexts, and how multiple learning outcomes can be integrated when designing curricula, teaching, and assessment methods.

How Scaffold helps educators

Scaffold demonstrates the links between transversal competences common to all competence frameworks and helps teachers:

• Identify and cluster learning outcomes according to teaching objectives, available resources, learning spaces, and teaching duration
• Articulate and deliver lessons and learning activities before entering the classroom
• Apply across any subject area at any level of the education system and in any type of non‑formal learning

Features of the card deck

The Scaffold cards serve as “bricks” that educators use to build learning experiences creatively, aligned with goals and learner needs.

• Portability: Easy to carry and use in collaborative settings
• Fluid structure: Encourages creativity and can be scaled to user needs
• Step‑by‑step design: Supports planning through assessment with clear prompts

Learning is like a tower, you have to build it step by step.

Who produced Scaffold?

Scaffold has been produced jointly by the European Training Foundation (ETF) — within its Creating New Learning initiative — and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, in the context of its work on key competences with the Directorate‑General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion.

• CNL identifier: [Provided in the original materials]

Resources and availability

Interested in using Scaffold? The following resources are available:

• Video
• Brief guide
• PowerPoint presentation
• Full guide
• Deck of cards that can be printed in black and white or colour

The brief guide, the full guide and the cards are available in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian and Uzbek – see Scaffold. Please note that we are not able to send decks of cards by post. If you would like to translate Scaffold in your national language, you may ask us for the source files. 

Share your experience and get in touch

We would like to hear about your projects at system, sector, or network level using Scaffold.

• Feedback: Please complete our survey to provide input on Scaffold’s usability and uptake.
• Cooperation: Contact the ETF’s Creating New Learning team at NewLearning@etf.europa.eu.