Community drive: Teaching children and young people to transform cities through game and data-driven methods

In this paper, we present the project Community Drive as well as the theoretical and empirical background on which the project is based. Community Drive is a technical and humanistic research and development project focused on education, learning and co-production of knowledge. Through technical and humanistic collaboration, the project aims to create models that allow children and young people to participate in overcoming future challenges in cities by becoming an active and contributing part of research and development efforts. In addition, the project aims to add to the knowledge about community-driven science and propose how design thinking can be used as an approach to learning ‘21st-century skills’. Further, the project contributes knowledge about community-driven game tools, user-driven big data and the Internet of Things and their connection with intelligent and socially responsible urban development. The project is conducted in cooperation with the city of Copenhagen, local schools and Aalborg University.
Community Drive involves students aged 10–14 attending schools in deprived neighbourhoods near Aalborg University Copenhagen in southern Copenhagen. This area is characterised by a high rate of unemployment, low income and little or no education, and it has been defined as an area of focus by various projects administrated by the city of Copenhagen. As a result, resources have been allocated for reconditioning the subsidised housing in this area.
In this paper, we discuss the ways in which the project Community Drive, initiated in May 2018, is based on the results of pilot projects conducted from 2014 to 2017. Overall, these studies showed that tasking students with changing their living conditions by redesigning their neighbourhoods is a strong motivational factor. During the redesign process, students were able to construct game-based models of various residents’ needs and argue for redesigns based on their knowledge about the area and the ability of certain designs to fulfil the needs of various groups of residents living in the area. The paper discusses the potential benefits and pitfalls of designing community-driven science gaming environments and how the results of previous studies led to the Community Drive project.