14-15.2.2013 in Tampere, Finland

Núñez, P. pnunezgo@ccinf.ucm.es

Lacasa Pilar. p.lacasa@uah.es

Complutense UniversityAlcalá University

Spain

My Media Playground

SimCity and Metropolis: New and old media in children’s lives

GOALS:

• The main goal of the project is to encourage the development of new forms of literacy within the framework of a participatory culture in relation to new communication practices supported by old and new technologies. (Jenkins ,2010)

• To show how a literacy in old media contributes to improve the literacy in new ones.

• How young people create cultural products and interact with them, which allows us to explore how they use multiple discourses

• How different ways of learning are useful for the classroom and for getting different skills

• For us, Children are authors and they create multimodal texts using new technologies to communicate an idea. They change from receivers to producers.

• Furthermore we are interested in exploring videogames as expressions of popular culture that are present in the daily lives of children(Buckingham&Willet,2009)

• We follow also James Gee (Gee &Hayes,2011) that thinks videogames could be instruments for learning ,because they involve specific forms of thought.

• By making machinima (Nitsche,2011), young people have to control what happens on the screen as directors, cameramen and filmmakers in a virtual world, and how they and their characters assume many other different roles in the mass media universe.

• Both technologies and forms of communication are dependent on each other and concepts such as machinima, convergence of platforms or transmedia experiences are concepts that help in the analysis of new media experiences.

Methodology

THE WORKSHOP

10 sesssions in secondary school

• The director explanation :Metropolis• To explore

• Children as producers• New literacies: montage

• By comparing Metropolis and the trailer of SimCity (2013) in the classroom, the children machinima productions could contribute to drawing awareness to the rules of transmedia phenomena.

• The Sims is one of the first games that provided resources to create machinima productions. Players control characters and the game has the potential to create digital performance, which forces an awareness of the games possibilities and its rules (Jenkins, 2006)

• Analysis of the students’ productions shows that they have faced problems that were not new to those who build stories using audiovisual discourses. (Lacasa,2009)

• Reflecting on what would be the best way to help them compose the film and assemble different multimodal pieces and working together helping each other.

Some Conclusions,..

• We anticipated that the students would face similar problems to those confronted by early filmmakers.

• We considered that some film productions, particularly a masterworks of expressionist cinema (an example of analogical culture), could help machinima authors solve specific problems they found when they needed to combine multimodal pieces to construct specific meanings for both themselves as creators and their potential audiences as receivers

• Young people support each other and create collectively and individually, but the community is the background of creation

• It would have another meaning if it could not be shared.

• The fact that technology is being used does not mean that young people understand the rules of discourses through which people communicate.

THANK YOU!!!

• http://www.filmeducation.org/metropolis/• http://www.ea.com/simcity• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckTWKSjy

aO8&feature=plcp

• http://ea.com