We designed two experiments, which tested Minecraft as a geogame environment for engaging young people in urban planning. Thus, how can games support children to co-design their future city? Which heritage values do they represent graphically in the game environment? Geogames are games that provide a visualization of a real spatial context and in this study, Minecraft is the tool which we use to explore youth engagement. Minecraft is employed as an innovative tool to tackle the present lack of engagement and involvement of key societal actors such as children and young people in urban planning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of Minecraft's game environment for urban planning with older and younger children in a public school in Tirol town, Brazil. The assessment of this initiative, carried out by the undergraduate students during the pilot study showed that there is a distinct need for connecting real spaces with technology and for familiarity with the tools that help pupils visualise the space and that Google SketchUp could be an effective tool that is easily applied to this project and can enrich geography lessons for pupils in upper primary and lower secondary education. The aim of the project was to create awareness of spaces and their functions, and to redesign those spaces using Google Sketch up according to criteria relating both to the environment and the needs of pupils and their education. Why? It didn’t work on Chromebooks.The educational project involving the design of a school yard using Google SketchUp, presented in this paper, was originally designed and implemented by undergraduate students at the Department of Primary Education of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA) in the context of their studies in the "Teaching Geography with ICT" course. They got very creative with those courses, which is great, but you could also extend this to tons of curriculum standards! Surface area, Roman architecture, volume, locations from literature, measurement, earthquake-resistant houses, perimeter, developing cities. After that, they moved up to creating a 3-hole putt-putt (mini-golf) course that fit within a certain area (see image). Matt was kind enough to share his resources during the session.īased on Matt’s information, we had our students make shapes with certain dimensions as they learned to use it (see image).
It was the perfect introduction to 3D-modeling, architecture and engineering for middle schoolers: powerful, but relatively easy to learn.Īfter seeing the awesome Matt England present at a local tech conference about his use of SketchUp with middle schoolers we even had information from someone who had used it about how to best introduce it. SketchUp is a free 3D modeling computer program made by Trimble and, for a while, owned by Google.
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