“Transport your physical creations into the virtual world”
The concept is a unique, absorbing and stimulating virtual city building game played on a tablet device, combined with a seemingly traditional construction kit, which contains technology that feeds the details of any built items into the virtual application, where they can be used in the game.
What is Makerblocks?
The idea came from learning that research has revealed that there is a decline in the number of students pursuing a career in creative industries. Some evidence suggests that the dependence on technology alone has had a large influence in the decline of creativity in children in the sense that virtual environment applications such as Minecraft, for example, do not provide an all-round creative experience due to the absence of working physically with their hands.
Aimed at younger children, ‘MakerBlocks’ is an appealing combination of the two elements of technology based gaming and physical imagination and creativity. It is a virtual city building game played on a tablet device requiring players to use their skills to physically make things needed for the game using a seemingly traditional style toy construction kit. The blocks within the kit, however, have inbuilt technology that feeds details of the completed item into the virtual application so that it can then be used in the game.
Once the application on the mobile device is aware a shape is being built, the creation can be used in the game to play with while building your city.
How Makerblocks is used.
Game creations and testing.
Each child was taken through a section of the game. This involved numerous open problems which could take place in the game. They were then asked to solve these problems using the physical blocks which will feed back information on their creations into the game.
Below shows examples of what a child's created city could look like and what their solutions to the in game problems could be. All creations seen were created by children during product testing.
