Serious Urban Play – a digital game for teaching urban and regional planning

Urban planning is a multi-faceted and collaborative discipline. Consequently, the articulation of the roles and complexities of spatial planning to prospective and first year higher education built environment students can be challenging for learning and teaching. This paper outlines the research and development of a ‘serious’ game (Prensky, 2006; Gee, 2007) which enables students to explore the relationships between and within complex urban systems. An interactive, multi-touch table PC allows teams of students to simultaneously collaborate on the spatial planning and design of an urban district. Two major types of game have emerged which are of pedagogical interest to planning educators: simulation games and virtual worlds. While these digital games use urban planning and development as their premise, many rely on a singular user interface and the establishment of financially or environmentally successful communities. Few consider planning education as their primary purpose. Furthermore this game allows the development of multi-stakeholder collaborative and negotiated outcomes which seek to balance the social, environmental, economic, and mobility needs of a community. Design-based research (DBR) is the principal methodology and theoretical basis for implementing and evaluating this teaching and learning intervention (Anderson and Shattuck, 2012). DBR is valuable here as an established education based research framework which seeks to ensure the transfer of research into improved practice. The development of the game advances the pedagogy of the ‘studio’ for the teaching and learning of urban spatial design. This is the first ‘fit for purpose’ teaching and learning tool for urban planning, which is a simultaneous multi player ‘serious’ game, played cooperatively on a horizontal plane, with planning education as its primary purpose.