Dream City builder Jenga

Sometimes when I was little, the neighbors looked over me and my brother. To this day, they represent the Quebequer identity with their simple post-crash cuisine and their catholic decor. They had a computer with games so thanks to them I got to play the original home home video games ever made. Otherwise I would have been late to the party, at 4, Tetris had already been out for that many years. I remember playing upstairs with toy cars on a carpet with a city drawn onto it. It was the beginning of my fascination for model cities and sims.

By laying out some general principles of the original Sim City game for Super Nintendo, I got them invested in a city of their own design, adding a Jenga twist to the activity. Polluting industries are necessary to create jobs in a nascent city and with education, cleaner technologies become accessible. Commercial buildings cannot be plowed until a critical mass of residents live there. I only later asked if they had thought of putting a hospital in, they haden’t and got right to adding the infrastructure to their creation.

Every city need citizens and this is where the Jenga twist came in. They were not allowed to work on their cities, only on its citizens. As they were doing so, they were taking turns on the Jenga tower. When it fell, they were allowed to finally build their city for a five minute window until a new Jenga game began and we repeated the process. This way, when first drawing their towns, they had citizens to please with their styles, their hopes and dreams. I hope this helped them feel like they were mayors in their own right. It was winners losers as in who made the tower fall actually got a turn on the iPad building a collective animated city in two frames. Towards the end of class, they were allowed to work on the cities even as we were playing Jenga. The Jenga took a bit of a back seat so I didn’t have to monitor who’s turn it was.

Unfortunately the city was accidentally deleted, I talk about this in a previous post.

I rebuilt what had been lost to the best of my recollection and I turned this animation into a contest which you can find here.

The fact this picture is upside down was not intentional on my part but I am thinking that I always get my kids to think outside of the box so this will do just fine.

All in all, we had a lot of fun. I asked them if like me, they were a bit in shock that our creation had vanished. The energy had really shifted at that point. They said yes and so I invited them to join me back again in September for a redo and they were eager to play Dream City Builder again.

Here is the city so far, if you like, please join us in our journey, when we come back in September, they would be overjoyed to see what you come up with.