Project Overview
This project will bring young people together from three different countries to collaborate and develop skills within an online gaming environment and in a real world context. The project will have two elements; firstly the project aims at developing the skills and knowledge among youth workers to engage young people in these online forums .The specific skills to be developed are as follows:
- Understanding gaming
- How to bring youth work into the world of gaming
- Games Design and Programming
- Group Communication and Language skills
- Community Planning and Development
Secondly the project will aim at using youth work to engage young people in a new and innovative way to promote and develop key competences
- Communication
- Decision making
- Team working
- Self confidence
- Organisation and planning
- Intercultural skills
The project will use a multiplayer realm in Minecraft/Starck project as the collaborative space. The task to be completed in this game is to construct a “virtual town” in Minecraft “youth town”. The format for the game will be an adaption of the development education game “Plan Newtown”. Participants will collaborate to locate, design and construct a range of buildings, roads, amenities and the landscape of a medium sized rural town. They will consider and discuss the location of the various amenities within their country teams and in collaboration with the teams in the other countries. Participants will base the “virtual designs” on buildings in their own towns.
http://www.ubuntu.ie/archive/nuig-deved-2014/cspe/plan-newtown.pdf
The project will involve training of youth workers in the world of gaming; this will be carried out in partner countries and also through weekly webinars. The training will also contain a leader seminar prior to the creation of “youth town”. Once trained, the youth workers shall begin engaging young people through this medium.
The project will be carried out over a two year period and will culminate in each partner country traveling with young people to visit the real versions of the Youth town they have created.
The project acknowledges that young people are spending more and more time in these virtual worlds and there is an obligation on Youth Workers to engage with these young people where they are at.
It is also worth noting as the landscape of youth work alters and the relevance or effectiveness of rural youth clubs wanes the importance of filling this space with quality youth work has never been more essential.