The Minecraft Nottingham research project is a perfect example of how Digital Nottingham is seeking to engage with young people; gaining valuable insights into how they see their city and contributing to the development of their digital skills.

For the uninitiated, Minecraft is an online 3D computer game – in fact, it is the best-selling video game in history, with over 238 million copies sold – in which players can build pretty much anything. The game involves building blocks and creating structures across different environments and terrains. Described by many as “online Lego”, the game forgoes physical bricks and blocks for virtual, computer-generated materials. This all happens in a virtual world where players are encouraged to gather resources, craft items, and plan and build structures.

Due to its status as one of the most popular games of all time with children and young people, Digital Nottingham saw Minecraft as the perfect vehicle to reach an important target audience, and encourage them to think about their city and spaces in a context familiar to them. To this end, we have been working with people across schools to “rebuild” Nottingham city centre inside the virtual world, in turn laying the groundwork for exciting and educational opportunities. Shaaron Ainsworth, Professor of Learning Sciences from the School of Education, is the Principal Investigator for the project. She said:

“We wanted to explore Minecraft as a way to explore and co-create not just Nottingham as a city, but also aspects of the Castle Meadow Campus and the Digital Nottingham spaces there.  So we made a digital gameboard of Nottingham from publicly available data for children to explore. The benefits to the Digital Nottingham project – and to the University of Nottingham and beyond – are sizeable.

Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time.

"It allows us to engage with young people on their terms, in a language they are familiar with and excited about. It will help us to identify and understand more about what younger people might want from Digital Nottingham as a place and activity.

“Longer term this could result in a Minecraft-realised version of the Castle Meadow Campus - both inside and out - and beyond, and the possibilities are immense. Just imagine – we could support virtual field trips to University of Nottingham in a virtual, Minecraft world, or we could host location-based games in the Digital Nottingham building and campus in general.”

Professor Ainsworth continued: “This project will be a fantastic window into the imagination of young people. It would also support primary and secondary education curriculum objectives in novel ways, for example in Geography, or Data Science, all the while building digital skills which will aid them in their future studies and careers.”

Whilst the project is still in relative infancy, a number of activities are being considered for the future, including:

• Children learning about their city through ordnance survey maps and then teleporting around within Minecraft to visit the main sites.
• Creation of location-based games where they visit the campus in Minecraft and in real-life whilst wearing trackers to map their exploration of the real and virtual spaces.
• Encouraging participants to use these experiences to become ‘community leaders’ engaging with their families and their wider community to incorporate needs, wants and sustainable priorities, which could then be expressed as Minecraft builds in their own right.​​​​​​​

The project ties in neatly with a Nottingham City Council bid to become a designated “Child Friendly City”. This is a global UNICEF initiative which aims to position cities and communities as places where local children and young people have a positive and meaningful input, so they can benefit from the plans, decisions, spaces and services they use. Nottingham is on a journey working in partnership with UNICEF UK towards international recognition as a Child Friendly City, and the Minecraft Nottingham project would undoubtedly form a symbiotic relationship with this wider drive to improve outcomes for our younger citizens. As part of the work towards having Nottingham recognised as a Child Friendly City, a public "Discovery Day" was held in November 2022 at the city's Albert Hall conference centre, where children and young people were given the opportunity to explore the Minecraft Nottingham environment.