The need

Some 5 000 Belarusian-diaspora students attend ~30 Saturday schools across the EU. None has a shared curriculum. Teachers — most of them volunteers — assemble lessons from fragmented PDFs, week to week, with no consistent way to measure what students retain. The 2024 Rada Belarusian-Diaspora-Saturday-Schools meeting in Brussels explicitly called for an integrated cross-curricular product; none yet exists.

The product

Padarozhnik is a heritage-quest game across 25 real Belarusian places. Each place hosts six learning tracks — Reading, Listening, History, Geography, Science, Civics — that interlock into a place-story. Completing a place fills the player's naturalist's notebook and unlocks the next. Belarus is one of Europe's most water-rich countries; over half the places are water-defined, and the Science track at those places teaches freshwater ecology and ichthyology with source-cited corpus material.

Partnerships in formation

Rada Belarusian-Diaspora-Saturday-Schools (Brussels) — pilot in 5 schools, autumn 2026
EHU Vilnius — content advisory on the Polacak / Skaryna materials
NAS Belarus Institute of Zoology — Science-track ichthyology consultation
Lithuanian Institute of Inland Waters & Marine Research — Curonian Lagoon, Nemunas content