![]() The Minecraft Generation Becomes Today’s City Planners ”įind a sample of the report Li wrote here. So if you’re given solar power, how many blocks can you build different kinds of built forms on depending on the criteria. “Like a floor-area ratio exercise where you can imagine density. “At the end of it what I made for the city of Toronto was a report that said how to build like the sub-server, how to host it, and some potential programming they can do with children,” Li said. Li examined examples in Sweden of architects and city planners collaborating to better design a suburb and learned from users at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario how to translate GIS data into the program. He describes the software as a “popular computer game where you basically craft things.” It’s analogous to “Lego,” he said, “but on your computer, or on your Xbox or PlayStation, or on your mobile phone.” For his own work during the summer of 2015, Li assessed the technical challenges the city would need to overcome to engage students in the school system in envisioning complete communities through Minecraft. For an internship at the chief planner’s office with the City of Toronto, another one of Robinson’s students, Jacky Li, helped the city initiate an educational program that envisions the entire city built in Minecraft.Ī master’s student from the University of Ryerson had written a report on how using Minecraft might be effective as an educational and planning tool for work with young children. Mather is not alone in researching the power of Minecraft to empower communities in urban planning decisions that can affect their daily lives. And they ended up building things in real life and having a museum exhibit that people could wander around in.”Įducating Young Students in the Virtual Minecraft City of Toronto It was a project that was sort of a visioning project. And then they allowed or gave away plots of land within the Minecraft city for people to build what they thought the city should be. “Which was, in the city of Stockholm, they brought in infrastructure related to Minecraft. “Such as something called Blockholm,” Mather said. To ensure they adequately understood the software, Mather created a video that explained the game, what it looked like and the various activities users could undertake. Many of the experts she spoke with during her master’s research project were senior-level and had not necessarily had much, if any, experience actually working with the Minecraft program. “I interviewed twelve people and came up with some really rich responses, actually.” “It was basically an exploratory study, sort of, where I went and spoke to planners and engagement specialists and asked them to what degree and in what context they thought that Minecraft could be a useful tool for planners to use for engagement,” she said. In 2014, she was recognized for community engagement in her thesis work with a Ryerson Gold Medal. Lisa Ward Mather studied Minecraft’s possible application to urban planning as a master’s student with Geothink Co-Applicant Pamela Robinson, associate dean in Ryerson University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning. Microsoft recently bought it and Mojang for a record $2.5 billion. ![]() The software launched by Mojang (a Swedish game studio) in 2009 now boasts more than 100 million users. Children who use it can engineer complex machines, model the world in cube-like form, shoot and post YouTube videos of their work, and setup servers to hang out on with their friends. For two Geothink researchers, harnessing youth enthusiasm for this tool is also central to helping cities make better planning decisions.įor the un-initiated, Minecraft isn’t so much a game but rather a destination, a technical tool, and a cultural scene all rolled into one program. When the New York Times recently ran a ten page magazine story on The Minecraft Generation, it focused primarily on young users learning basics of computer science through their engagement with this software. Minecraft users envisioned the City of Stockholm in Sweden the way they wanted it to be using the popular game.
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