Pupils from Wick and Thurso High Schools completed Highland’s first ever Reinventing Regions challenge with Minecraft Education.
Imagine having the opportunity to rebuild your town from scratch – what would you keep? What would you change? What design features would make community life so much healthier and happier for all?
These questions and more occupied the minds of two groups of pupils at Wick and Thurso High School. The pupils – who are mostly in S1 – are the first in the Highlands to take on the Reinventing Regions project launched by Focus North. Inspired by the global Reinventing Cities programme, Focus North worked with Highland Council to adapt it for North Highland. With support from youth workers Heather Manson and Caitlin Risbridger, the pupils worked as a team to brainstorm ideas, delegate tasks and design their towns using Minecraft Education tools.
The project was a huge success, with both sets of pupils forming strong bonds and lasting friendships – as well as creating new worlds with jaw-dropping detail.
Today, Focus North was delighted to attend a special celebration event to mark their achievements and enjoy a tour of the the towns. The pupils spoke with great confidence as they explained their design choices then introduced the worlds they had built. Adding a touch of Scots humour, the names ‘Thurso’ and ‘Wick’ were abandoned in favour of St Tattiesburg and Mincetown!
Both towns had been carefully considered, both for sustainability, public services and quality of life.
Thurso’s design featured:
- Buildings manufactured in bamboo for sustainability
- Emergency services clustered together
- Offshore wind turbines and a hydro-electric dam
- A harbour with dock and boats for fishing and transport
- Local markets selling fish and vegetables in addition to supermarkets and malls
- A modern community centre and play equipment
- Huge amounts of green space including a forest, a farm growing beets, carrots and wheat, a bamboo plantation, play parks and allotments
- Lots of wildflowers, trees, wildlife and bee hives for pollinators
Wick’s design featured:
- Houses built from spruce and oak
- Onshore and offshore wind turbines complete with ladders and chains for hoisting repair equipment
- A beautiful solar dome in the middle of town housing tropical fish, bees and flowers, along with a solar farm on the outskirts of town
- Community facilities including school, hospital, play parks and nature walk
- Farms growing crops and keeping livestock
- Lots of energy-efficiency measures including solar powered lights that turn off automatically during the daytime
One of the most striking aspects of both designs was the absence of cars and the thought pupils put into their choices – placing community facilities alongside housing to enable people to walk more, and paying attention to the need for indigenous wildflowers, pollinators and sustainable materials.
Asked why they did not use local stone to build houses, Thurso High School said they preferred bamboo because it regenerates quickly and mining stone could have a significant environmental impact. Wick High School said if they could implement one aspect of their design into Wick as it is now, it would be the nature walk. Asked what they would do with all the extra power generated by renewables, they said they would sell it back to the grid and reinvest profits into their town.
Focus North created this project to capture young people’s ideas and channel that into emerging opportunities in the region. The enthusiasm and consideration the pupils – who are mostly aged 12 and 13 – brought to the project impressed everyone involved.
Perhaps more importantly, the teams forged strong bonds, presented their work with confidence and freely shared their challenges and inspirations. One of the biggest challenges along the way was an IT glitch that caused them to lose all their work near the end of the project, just before Christmas. Undeterred, the pupils decided to take a deep breath and start again, completing their builds by February.
Their hard work and resilience was recognised with several awards:
- Dynamic Youth Award
- HLH Young Green (conservation) Award
- Youthlink Scotland Participatory Democracy Award
And thanks to project sponsors Amentum, both teams were awarded with a PlayStation 5 console to continue their educational gaming at school.