CRAFTING DIGITAL PLACES
Laptop/Desktop Edition
This is Crafting Digital Places, a teaching resource by Oscar Keyes and Luke Meeken focusing on critically experiencing, making, and sharing digital places. Particular attention is paid to the ways colonizing norms are encouraged by many digital places, and how digital places may habituate non-colonial and anti-colonial* sentiments and actions toward digital and physical places and lands.
We've taught this content with middle and high school students, in-person, but it could also be used for self-teaching, or for remote teaching. Elements of it could definitely be adapted for use with younger learners.
To the left are the modules of the curriculum, and below are the tools we use in teaching it. They're presented in an order that reflects how we often teach this work, but we also change how we move through this resource every time we teach with it, and encourage you to rearrange, omit, and append to suit your setting!
One tool we've used to remix the content of this site is to create a shared Google doc to organize links to resources from this site, and to organize students into groups for collaboration.
This curriculum is designed for use on Windows and Mac PCs that can install the various free software tools. We also have an adapted version of the curriculum for use on Chromebooks and Netbooks so that students remote-learning with those devices can create virtual worlds online without installing new software.
TOOLS WE'LL USE
The site we use to model our characters (and possibly other objects for your world!). Like sculpting digital clay.
Another 3D modeling site you can use. Like building with digital blocks. You can create an account with a fake email, if you don't have an email address (but write down your password if you do!).
Google drive is a great way to share and store files. We can use this to share and store our final worlds, as well as things like fun models we make.
Unity is a free program used by artists and game designers to create all sorts of interactive experiences. This is the program we use in camp to make our worlds.
*Unity needs to be installed on your computer before you can use it
Blender is a free 3D modelling program. It's very powerful, but also tricky to use. In this project, we'll just be using it to process SculptGL models so they play more nicely in Unity.
*Blender needs to be installed on your computer before you can use it
OBS is a free screencasting tool used by video artists, YouTubers, and game streamers. We use it to record walk-throughs of our virtual worlds, and ones made by other people.
*OBS needs to be installed on your computer before you can use it
*Note: While these tools are all free, some do require installation on a computer. If you would prefer to use browser-based tools that don't require installation on systems, please take a look at our Chromebook/Netbook version of this resource.