Last year there was news that the Swedish school introduces compulsory Minecraft lessons. Inspired by this example, I made a timid attempt to dig in the direction of using games in training and created an online course on designing cities where video games, board games and movies are studied.

Many games in their mechanics or legends, you can find the principles of designing real cities. The games serve as an illustration of urban planning and economics, and thus are the first step in studying this subject area.
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Playing in the “Colonialists” you can, for example, learn about the importance of ports and analyze the history of the development of the cities of Mumbai and York. And using the example of “Boom Beach” one can understand that not all coastal cities were used to protect fortifications, and to study the history of Venice.

Under the cut are examples of the games “100,000 years BC”, “Triple Town”, “Carcassonne”, “Temple Run” and the movie “Back to the Future”. And also some details about this experimental course.

5 examples

100,000 years BC

Brief description of game mechanics

In each round, the player chooses where to invest: to increase the population, grow grain, develop tools, get food, get construction resources, build buildings, gain knowledge.


Sample cities

- Hyderabad (India): high population + low level of technology development
- Vatican: low population + high level of knowledge

Triple town

Brief description of game mechanics

By adding urban objects of the same order, objects of a higher order are obtained. For example, 3 huts form a house, and 3 houses form a large mansion, and so on.


Sample cities

Novosibirsk: in 1893, the first village appeared in the area of ​​the Kamenka River, and in 1894, a new village appeared in the area of ​​the Ob River, which led to their unification and the formation of a new, already large village.

Carcassonne

Brief description of game mechanics

As long as the city is not completely surrounded by a wall, other players can join it in order to divide, as well as capture.


Sample cities

Dubrovnik: First the Romans came to the island and began to build a city. And the Croats founded their city nearby and, before the Roman part was completely surrounded by the city wall, they connected both cities into one.

Temple run

Brief description of the game legend

The temple is a sacred place where valuables are stored and carefully guarded.


Sample cities
Tirupati: all donations are kept inside the temple, including tons of gold. Thus, India has the largest amount of gold stored outside banks.

Back to the Future

Brief description of the movie legend

In the film trilogy, one of the main locales is the square in front of the Hill Valley Courthouse. And if we consider the chronological order, then at the beginning (the third part of the trilogy) there was a square where people gathered, and only then they installed a clock tower there.


Sample cities

Ancient Rome: the Roman Forum was originally a market, and only then administrative buildings appeared on it.

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A bit about the organization of the course

When creating the course, I focused on the Hack Design course, where once a week 5 references were selected for a particular topic and the Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC's The Walking Dead course, where certain aspects of sociology were explained using examples of zombie behavior.

The main objectives of the course are to inspire students, to help them learn the basics of urban design, to give basic knowledge of how to build a city. The course is suitable for people who want to get acquainted with the design of cities, learn about the subject before a deeper and more serious study, look at the subject from the other side, or simply draw inspiration. In addition to practical examples, the course also contains theory, in particular, small videos and links for further study.

First of all, when creating video lessons, I wanted to get away from the format of the weather forecast and in no case do not take teaching selfie . Therefore, it was decided to focus on the following characteristics of the video: short, exciting attention, evoking emotions and a desire to review the video. And as the best practices were considered the video “Changing Education Paradigms” from RSA Animate, the Simon's Cat cartoons and the showril The Mill .

As links, preference was given to links to articles in Wikipedia as a multilingual resource, containing a large amount of additional material and links for further reading. Since the course is in English, it is convenient to have a theory in your native language at hand.

I also want to note the feature of the Stepic platform on which the course is placed - a lesson with theory or tasks that you like can be pasted onto another platform, for example, in a separate article .

PS Link to the course: stepic.org/city
PPS Especially for Habr, I recorded a Russian voice acting intro video: