School of Fun for Children in Fukushima

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

We held a 3-day pre-training and 3-day production virtual reality (VR) camp during the May holidays in Japan, to continue to build the unprecedented worlds that we started at the March camp. Twenty-one children from Fukushima and other areas participated in the program, ranging from 2nd grade elementary school students to 2nd grade high school students.

While adults demonstrated how to place objects from the voxel world into the VR world through adjustment of the 3D models, we asked the children to concentrate on their creation in the voxel world for the time being, and to create freely as if an automatic manufacturing machine were copying their creations into the world. Divided into three realms, children created a series of realistic or mysterious things that make up the worlds, as they wished. They then instructed the "automatic manufacturing machine" how they wanted the created objects to be placed and moved in the VR world.

The worlds created by the children's creativity were arranged in a single VR world with six floors: a spiritual world, gems, crystals and slime; a residential area, a treehouse and a library; a submerged city, a castle on the water, an underwater world and other water-related places; giant creatures; a future world and athletics, and the space.

The creation continues even after the camp period: there are three water worlds where you can dive and swim, and fish that pop out of those worlds fall into residential neighborhoods, just as the designers of the residential area wanted to do from the beginning. The children are now chatting about what they want to do with the fish that have fallen. We intend to further develop these worlds based on children's ideas. Let’s continue to break precedents to create new worlds!

Links:

• Academy Camp Facebook page in English