Using Minecraft to Engage!
Anyone who has regular contact with young children may be well aware of the engaging qualities of Minecraft as an online platform where children can explore their imaginations and create their own worlds. It is of no suprise then that many educators have looked at developing this well known game to help engage and educate their classes. More recently heritage centres and museums have started to harness this phenomenon to widen their audiences and make history, heritage and culture more relevant to the younger members of their communities. We are no exception to this. Ullapool Museum and the Lost Inverlael team highlighted this opportunity in the early days of the project and incorporated the creation of a Minecraft landscape into the funding bid.
Adam Clark 'Wizard Keen'
What will the game entail?
The game will take the player back to the mid-18th Century and progress through a year in the lives of the people who lived and worked in Inverlael. The game play will be directed by the seasons and the tasks, events and duties that each season brings about. This will show the player how intrinsically linked the people, landscape and season were in the Highland of Scotland.
The game will follow a set of series of small seasonal tasks that look at agriculture, industry, folk lore and most importantly Gaelic. With help from Ullapool Primary School Gaelic Medium pupils and our own Gaelic Medium Museum Assistant, we will introduce the Minecraft world to the rich Gaelic history of the North West Highlands.
The tasks that will be invloved include:
- Fishing
- Gathering seaweed to make Kelp
- Planting crops
- Celebrating Samhain and New Year
- Cooking traditional meals
- Grazing Cattle on the sheilings
- Taking livestock to market
We hope that the game will be available for free on the Minecraft market place and available cross platform, to ensure that all children have the opportunity to engage with the map and game. We expect the final procudt to be launched some time early in the new year.
Adam Clarke started collaborating with Stampy in Wonder Quest. He is best known for playing Wizard Keen, the deuteragonist, and a good wizard who assists Stampy in most of their quests. Soon after, he was featured in Stampy’s Lovely World for a few episodes as the character “Wizard Keen”. He also has involvement in two Stampy Shorts: in the episode Don’t Press The Button in which he voiced a super computer, and the episode Enough Chickens? in which he created the customised skins. He created (with some helpers) the Space Den map for Stampy and Sqaishey.
Adam has also specialised in creating historic landscapes to bridge the gap between younger generations and learning about heritage, history and culture. This has included creating historic worlds such as:
- Roman City
- Tudor City
- Hadrian’s Wall
