Urbanize Yourself! – Oststadt Games

Workshops to-go for children and youths

Exterior view of a window with handicrafts and the inscription »Oststadt Games«, in the foreground more handicrafts
Duration
2021

The project »Urbanize Yourself! – Oststadt Games« has reached young people in the Karlsruhe district 230 times with creative ideas, instructions and material! Now we invite everyone to the project exhibition at the large windows of the Kinder- und Jugendhaus Oststadt!

 

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Inspired by the ZKM exhibition »zkm_gameplay. the next level«, we conceived our project in cooperation with the Kinemathek Karlsruhe and the children's and youth centres Rintheim and Oststadt / Stadtjugendausschuss e.V. The target group of the project are children and young people aged 7 to 14 from the above-mentioned youth centres.

We, the project partners, perceive the city in which we live as a platform for democratic participation and it is precisely this platform that we want to shape together with our target group. We want to develop and test participatory methods and tools with the participants. We hope that the facilitators will be perceived as guides and that the cultural institutions, such as ZKM and the Kinemathek, will be perceived as further places of appropriation. The great Deutscher Museumsbund e.V. likes our visions and supports us within the framework of the »Museum macht stark« program.

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF NOT FOR CORONA ...

The project was intended to bring together a mixed group of children and young people in the youth centres and their outdoor spaces who like to play games, but are just as enthusiastic about programming, filming, photographing, telling stories, designing and building. Many of them have expert knowledge about virtual and analogue (game) worlds. We wanted to invite them to design games with us, to build human-sized game figures and obstacles in the city and to extend the game into the virtual with digital technologies. The final event was to be played collectively! But after the first lockdown 2020, the pandemic found no end and everything changed.

Open Gallery
  • Collage of photos with children doing handicrafts in workshops
  • Exterior view of a window with handicrafts, the ZKM logo and the inscription »next level«

Overview
  • Collage of photos with children doing handicrafts in workshops
  • Exterior view of a window with handicrafts, the ZKM logo and the inscription »next level«

LUNCHBOX HACK WITH PROJECT BAG

The second lockdown separated us from our target group in physical space before we could really get started. Looking for strategies to work creatively together with children and young people, we came up with the idea of the »workshop to-go«.

Every lunchtime, the cooperating children's and youth centres distribute packed lunches to the district children/young people and so we decided to develop project bags with workshop materials and instructions to be distributed with the packed lunches during the week. At the end of the week, an online project workshop was offered on Fridays, in which the participants could get creative together with us in a video conference. Designing wild-flying propellers, glowing clay figures or models of nested pop-up houses are some examples.

THE EXHIBITION AND THE OUTLOOK

Over the weeks, the project bags became more and more popular and were distributed in the district under the name »Oststadt-Games« a total of 230 times. We would like to conclude the project for the time being with a final games action exhibition.

Currently, with the help of the last »Workshop to-go« bags, many exciting game figures are being created by the participants. The playing field for the figures can already be admired at the window of the Kinder- und Jugendhaus Oststadt. From mid-May 2021, the project exhibition »Oststadt-Games« was set up with a small event and is visible on site. We have already started programming a »jump 'n' run« game for the exhibition and the figures with Scratch. For the future, we hope to program the game with the freeware Scratch and to be able to play it together online/offline/indoor/outdoor. We remain flexible!

 

Project exhibition »Oststadt-Games«

 

The start of the exhibition is 14.05.2021.

Location: Kinder- und Jugendhaus Oststadt, Rintheimer Straße 47, 76131 Karlsruhe

Exterior view of a youth centre with colourful handicrafts in the window

 

Projektpartner

Logos of the cooperation partners of the project »Urbanisiere Dich! – Oststadt Games«
Organization / Institution
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Project team

Project management: Banu Beyer, ZKM | Museum Communication
Project idea, concept and realisation: Banu Beyer, Carmen Beckenbach, Fanny Kranz, Max Kosoric

Partners

Marc Teuscher, Kinemathek Karlsruhe
Sebastian Pflüger and Wilfried Grüßinger, Children's and youth centres Rintheim and Oststadt

Sponsors

This project is funded by the Deutschen Museumsbund e.V.