NEWS


Minecraft for ‘Firenze dei Bambini’

Just for kids: the only event of its kind in the world, on Saturday 20 and Sunday  21 May on occasion of the ‘Firenze dei Bambini’ festival promoted by the City of Florence and organised by MUS.E.

The Museo Novecento, overlooking the splendid Piazza Santa Maria Novella, will be the venue for the ‘Citta’ del Futuro’, where children will find a thousand ways to express their creativity using old and new technologies.

‘We will be making use of Minecraft, the world’s favourite PC sandbox game, to bring children closer to art,’ explains Marco Vigelini, one of the 60 internationally-recognised Minecraft educators and the first to introduce this game to the Italian schools as a teaching/learning tool. ‘The Museum of London and the Tate Modern have created Minecraft worlds to show children such things as what the 20th-century London art scene was like or to relive the Great Fire that swept the city centre in 1666. But with MUS.E, we decided to go where no museum had gone before. The children will be donning artist’s smocks and, for the first time anywhere, the real works they create in these two days at the  Museo Novecento workshops will be ‘exhibited’  in the virtual spaces of the Minecraft reconstruction of the same museum. With the aid of Creatubbles.com (a safe social platform for children), the Shapescape team of Minecraft world builders and internationally-known YouTubers such as Adam Clarke and Stephen Reid, the entire city centre of Florence has been entirely reconstructed, block after block,  in the Minecraft virtual environment and is available to the children.’

View a short preview at: tinyurl.com/musecraft.

‘Besides the fact that it gives children the chance to exhibit their artworks at the virtual Museo Novecento and shows off the sights of Florence to children all over the world,’ says Giovanni Carta, in charge of the communications and external relations area at MUS.E., ‘we also found the idea of Minecraft attractive because we will be using it as a tool for delivering the contents of the REPLICATE [REnaissance of PLaces with Innovative Citizenship And TEcnology] European project to young people. They will be able to interact with several characters who will explain how the solutions individuated by REPLICATE – for sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, Internet Of Things development – can heighten quality of life for every citizen, so demonstrating the positive impact of the new technologies.’

Technically speaking, the children’s artworks will be digitised and shared on the safe social platform for artists from all around the world, Creatubbles.com. Thanks to the Creatubbles mod, these digitised works can be easily transformed into Minecraft paintings ready to be hung for exhibit at the virtual Museo Novecento: in short, the project moves from a physical museum to a virtual one, but the works on show will be the real, physical artworks created by the children.

The Minecraft world created for ‘Firenze dei Bambini’ will be made available at the Museo Novecento website beginning on Monday, 22 May, complete with all the instructions needed to allowing to allow the children to continue to exhibit their creations and to virtually explore the entire city of Florence and learn about its art.