Item9MinecraftPanningYouthEngagementProject

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Plan­ning Com­mit­tee Agenda Item 9 23/04/2021

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

FOR INFORM­A­TION Title: MINE­CRAFT PLAN­NING YOUTH ENGAGEMENT

PROJECT

Pre­pared by: Dan Har­ris, Plan­ning Man­ager, For­ward Plan­ning and

Service Improvement

Pur­pose

To update the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee on the plan­ning youth engage­ment pro­ject under­taken by the CNPA plan­ning ser­vice with the Cairngorms Youth Action Group.

Back­ground

1. The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity has a plan­ning ser­vice improve­ment pri­or­ity focused on enga­ging young people in the plan­ning system:

“Devel­op and deliv­er a youth engage­ment / involve­ment pro­gramme – Roll out a pro­gram of work to engage young people, includ­ing the involve­ment of the Cairngorms Youth Action Group, in the plan­ning sys­tem.”

1. The COV­ID-19 restric­tions of the last twelve months and uncer­tainty around future social dis­tan­cing meas­ures have made engage­ment dif­fi­cult, par­tic­u­larly with young people. In spring 2020 officers there­fore iden­ti­fied a need to explore options that did not rely on meet­ing face to face but would be enga­ging activ­it­ies in their own right.

What is Minecraft?

1. Mine­craft was chosen as a poten­tial mech­an­ism for engage­ment as it is a pop­u­lar game for many ages of play­er, and is recog­nised as a poten­tial learn­ing plat­form as well as being fun. It is an open world single or mul­ti­play­er game that pro­motes cre­ativ­ity, col­lab­or­a­tion and prob­lem solv­ing in an immers­ive envir­on­ment where the only lim­it is the ima­gin­a­tion of the user. The game focuses on allow­ing the play­er to explore, inter­act with, and modi­fy a dynam­ic­ally-gen­er­ated or pur­pose­fully designed map made of one-cubic-meter-sized blocks

2. Mine­craft has been used as a learn­ing plat­form that offers edu­cat­ors a trans­form­at­ive way to engage stu­dents and ignite their pas­sion for learn­ing. Mine­craft: Edu­ca­tion Edi­tion for example, is an edu­ca­tion­al ver­sion of Mine­craft spe­cific­ally designed for classroom use. It has been used to engage chil­dren and youth in city plan­ning where

3. the cre­at­ive and build­ing aspects of the game allow play­ers to build struc­tures togeth­er. It has been used by UN-Hab­it­at¹ for this pur­pose, who found that using Mine­craft as a com­munity par­ti­cip­a­tion tool for pub­lic space design helped pro­mote improved civic engagement².

It was hoped that if it could be tailored to the Cairngorms Nation­al Park, that Mine­craft could be used to engage young people in the Park’s envir­on­ment and built form and give them an intro­duc­tion into the world of plan and policy making.

The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Mine­craft Map

1. Mine­craft maps of real world places have been cre­ated for numer­ous places, includ­ing a map of GB by Ord­nance Sur­vey³, Scot­land by Immers­ive Mind­s⁴ and Den­mark by the Dan­ish Gov­ern­ment⁵. The map cre­ated for the Cairngorms Nation­al Park was cre­ated using open source tools and open data from Ord­nance Sur­vey and Scot­tish Forestry / Forestry and Land Scot­land. The Mine­craft map could not be cre­ated per­fectly to scale because Mine­craft lim­its the height of maps to 265 blocks. How­ever, this has led to a com­pres­sion of fea­tures that means recog­nis­able fea­tures of the Cairngorms such as the Lairig Ghru, the Cairngorms plat­eau and indi­vidu­al sum­mits are closer togeth­er and easi­er to explore.

2. The map has gen­er­ated a lot of interest from Mine­craft play­ers keen to play with­in it, espe­cially after the BBC covered its use with Youth Action Group⁶ in Feb­ru­ary. The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Mine­craft map will be avail­able from 23 April 2021 for any­one to down­load and use in Mine­craft via the CNPA web­site at https://​cairngorms​.co​.uk/​c​a​r​i​n​g​-​f​u​t​u​r​e​/​e​d​u​c​a​t​i​o​n​/​l​e​a​r​n​i​n​g​/​m​i​n​e​c​raft/.

The Youth Engage­ment Project

1. The concept of the youth engage­ment pro­ject was to use Mine­craft as an inter­act­ive tool to encour­age people to think about place, the plan­ning sys­tem and the dif­fer­ent act­ors involved. Mem­bers of the Cairngorms Youth Action Team were ​‘dropped’ into the Cairngorms Nation­al Park Mine­craft envir­on­ment and asked to work as a team to col­lab­or­at­ively cre­ate a com­munity that rep­res­ents the sort of place they would like to live in.

2. The Cairngorms Youth Action Team were asked to build their com­munity while keep­ing them in accord­ance with the four aims of the Nation­al Park. The Mine­craft envir­on­ment has few lim­its to what play­ers can do, so in order to foster cooper­a­tion and con­struct­ive rela­tion­ships the play­ers were asked to fol­low three prac­tic­al rules to:

¹ https://​unhab​it​at​.org ² A case study: https://thecityateyelevel.com/stories/using-minecraft-for-children-participatory-public-space-design/#:~:text=UN-Habitat’s exper­i­ence using Minecraft,design of pub­lic space pro­jects. ³ https://​www​.ord​nance​sur​vey​.co​.uk/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​1​5​/​0​8​/​m​i​n​e​c​r​a​f​t​-​m​a​p​s​-​c​o​n​t​i​n​u​e​-​t​o​-​grow/ ⁴ https://​www​.immers​ive​minds​.com/​b​u​i​l​d​-​i​t​-​s​c​o​tland ⁵ https://​www​.bbc​.co​.uk/​n​e​w​s​/​t​e​c​h​n​o​l​o​g​y​-​2​7​1​55859 ⁶ Cairngorms recre­ated in video game Mine­craft — BBC News

a) Don’t dam­age oth­er people’s things. b) If you break some­thing by acci­dent, fix it; and c) Don’t delib­er­ately kill oth­er players

1. Bey­ond those guidelines, play­ers had the free­dom to use the Mine­craft envir­on­ment to achieve whatever they wished. This meant that they could think about the impacts of cre­at­ing and apply­ing policies or rules; could act­ively plan their devel­op­ment and con­sider the impacts of their devel­op­ment, their use of resources and what things they might change in their approaches with experience.

2. CNPA officers facil­it­ated reg­u­lar meet­ings with the Youth Action Group mem­bers par­ti­cip­at­ing to dis­cuss what they had done and to reflect on their decision mak­ing pro­cess. The group was asked to cre­ate policies and set out land alloc­a­tions with design criteria.

3. The final ele­ment of the pro­ject is being under­taken at this Plan­ning Com­mit­tee meet­ing, with mem­bers of the Cairngorms Youth Action Group observing the Com­mit­tee meet­ing and real decision-mak­ing being under­taken before present­ing some of their own exper­i­ences of the pro­ject to the Plan­ning Committee.

Con­clu­sion and Next Steps

1. The Mine­craft Plan­ning Engage­ment Pro­ject has been an inter­est­ing pro­ject to under­take dur­ing the restric­tions of COV­ID-19. Our ini­tial con­clu­sions are that:

a) The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Mine­craft map is a fun and enga­ging envir­on­ment for Mine­craft play­ers of all ages; and b) The map and Mine­craft provide an easy and enga­ging way for young people to con­sider issues that are rel­ev­ant to land use plan­ning and to land man­age­ment choices.

1. Officers will under­take a full eval­u­ation of the exer­cise after this Plan­ning Com­mit­tee meet­ing and will bring anoth­er report to the Plan­ning Com­mit­tee in due course. The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Mine­craft map is now avail­able for any­one to down­load to play with or to use for edu­ca­tion­al pur­poses. We expect that people will enjoy using it and hope that oth­er organ­isa­tions with more dir­ect involve­ment with young people will make use of it for edu­ca­tion­al purposes.

Dan Har­ris April 2021 danharris@​cairngorms.​co.​uk