Virtual Cities as a Collaborative Educational Environment

Abstract

The CIVITAS (Virtual Cities with Technologies for Learning and Simulating) project presents a research, teaching and extension approach directed to the construction of cities imagined by students in the first years of elementary school, with an emphasis to the fourth grade. The teacher ventures on a deviation from the official curriculum proposed to reflect upon the invention of cities along with the children. Within this context, the game Città is introduced as an environment that allows the creation of digital real/virtual/imagined cities, and enables different forms of interaction among the students through networked computers. The cooperative situations, made possible by the access to the game, are tools for teachers and students to think about the information that operate as general rules and words of order with the invention of the city/knowledge.