Child Protection Japan Project #13568

School of Fun for Children in Fukushima

by Academy Camp

Project Report | Aug 22, 2022
Academy Camp VR 2022.7 - Unprecedented World Tour

By Kenji Saito | Representative Director

Hide and seek a treasure egg in this vast world!

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

During the July 3-day holidays in Japan, we held an invitation-only virtual reality camp. Twelve children from all over Japan participated in this camp, where they once again toured the "Unprecedented World," which they have been creating since March. The world consists of six levels, starting from the bottom: the spirit floor, the residential floor, the water floor, the creature floor, the challenge floor, and the space floor. Each floor is filled with architecture and other objects created by children.

In the camp, this time, we tried out a pilot version of a game design using the world. We have prepared only one treasure egg. Everyone has to hide it somewhere in the vast world and search for it. At first, we tried to play it in such a way that whoever got the egg the fastest hid it somewhere, everyone else looked for it, and whoever found it hid it again somewhere else. It was fun enough.

Then we came up with a way to play against teams. The children were divided into two teams, each entering a different instance of the Unprecedented World, where they hid the only one egg, and when they finished hiding it, they entered the other team's instance to search for the egg that the other team had hidden. The children were so excited just to decide where to hide their egg. Both teams hid the eggs in places where they would never have been able to find them in the usual way, and by gradually getting hints from each other, they were finally able to find the opponent's egg.

This was a trial version of our August activity, and I think everyone got a good feeling about the game, which they do not just play, but also take part in its design.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how energetic are you now?

Trying to catch a sushi in a space station

Two teams compete to hide and seek the egg!

Trying to hide the treasure egg under the water.

Links:

Academy Camp Facebook page in English

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May 30, 2022
Academy Camp VR 2022.5 - Unprecedented Worlds for All Continue

By Kenji Saito | Representative Director

A space station and a colony designed by children

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

We held a 3-day pre-training and 3-day production virtual reality (VR) camp during the May holidays in Japan, to continue to build the unprecedented worlds that we started at the March camp. Twenty-one children from Fukushima and other areas participated in the program, ranging from 2nd grade elementary school students to 2nd grade high school students.

While adults demonstrated how to place objects from the voxel world into the VR world through adjustment of the 3D models, we asked the children to concentrate on their creation in the voxel world for the time being, and to create freely as if an automatic manufacturing machine were copying their creations into the world. Divided into three realms, children created a series of realistic or mysterious things that make up the worlds, as they wished. They then instructed the "automatic manufacturing machine" how they wanted the created objects to be placed and moved in the VR world.

The worlds created by the children's creativity were arranged in a single VR world with six floors: a spiritual world, gems, crystals and slime; a residential area, a treehouse and a library; a submerged city, a castle on the water, an underwater world and other water-related places; giant creatures; a future world and athletics, and the space.

The creation continues even after the camp period: there are three water worlds where you can dive and swim, and fish that pop out of those worlds fall into residential neighborhoods, just as the designers of the residential area wanted to do from the beginning. The children are now chatting about what they want to do with the fish that have fallen. We intend to further develop these worlds based on children's ideas. Let’s continue to break precedents to create new worlds!

Word chain game with things you have at home

Water runs down the exterior stairs of a building

Trolleys will run around each floor of the tower

Place this volcano on the ocean floor

Let's continue to create unprecedented worlds!

Links:

Academy Camp Facebook page in English

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Apr 3, 2022
Academy Camp VR 2022.3 - You Create! Everyone's Unprecedented Worlds

By Kenji Saito | Representative Director

Play in an unprecedented world under development

Please find a Japanese version of this report here.

We held another three-day VR (Virtual Reality) camp during the Japanese holidays in March. This time, each child decided for themselves what kind of VR world they would create. Fourteen children, ranging from first-graders to first-year high school students, participated in this exciting endeavor.

First, we reviewed how to use various VR apps, online whiteboards, and other tools, while detailing the images of the maverick world everyone wanted to create, which we had heard about from them beforehand. We wanted to hear from everyone's mouth what kind of world they would create in the VR conference room, but instead everyone took the liberty of changing the configuration of the conference room and started playing with it. It is our policy at Academy Camp to never allow time for adults to simply pass on knowledge to children. Therefore, we were never supposed to use a "lecture" type meeting room, where everyone sits facing forward except the instructor, but the children changed to that setting on their own. The reason was that the whiteboard in front of the room was easy for everyone to see and perfect for drawing! (As the children draw on their desks, their drawings are reflected on the whiteboard in front of them.) We thought it was very precious time for the children to draw with all their hearts, so we left them alone.

It may have been worth it. Once the children began to create the elements of their "unprecedented" world, they showed their talents to the fullest and filled the world with strange and wonderful objects. A giant monster and its nest, jumping slimes, suddenly appearing waterways, an impossibly tall tree house, a big kitten, toy train tracks, a summer-inspired house, a giant tree, colorful stairs and world boundaries. We ended this short camp with a promise to continue creating this world (so we didn't really check out from the camp). We think we got off to a good start in creating a maverick world!

PLEASE HELP US LITTLE BY LITTLE

GlobalGiving's April 2022 Little by Little campaign will be held from April 4 to 8 EDT (from 13:00 on April 4 to 12:59 on April 9, JST). During this campaign, all eligible donations up to $50 USD per unique donor per organization will be matched at 50%. We hope that you will take this great opportunity to support GlobalGiving projects so that all children on Earth will be able to live their own bright future. And if possible, we would be grateful for your support for Academy Camp with the children in Fukushima and all over Japan.

Check in to creation of worlds we have never seen

Review how a world is created in a VR meeting

Building constructions

Unprecedented lifeform?

The world is still under development

Links:

Academy Camp Facebook page in English

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