Projects Underway

The major goal of this project is to build a diverse community with computer games as the platform for student engagement, creativity, learning and fun. We expect the participants and members of this gaming community to solve real and relevant social and community problems using games as the means. We plan to pilot and publicize a gaming initiative for community building by using Minecraft as the initial game since it promotes creative construction of artifacts and it is also very popular among students from all disciplines and levels. More specifically this effort will promote hackathon-like competitions to build scale models of UB using Minecraft. We expect this discipline agnostic activity will provide students a forum to unleash their creativity. The problem we will solve initially is to build a scale model of UB’s “spine” buildings across the North campus. Ultimately we hope to replicate the entire campus with activities centered in the Student Union and Libraries. We will refer to this as UBuild project. The building activities started during the hackathon competition will be sustained through a computer games student club. We will create a guide for how we implemented UBuild to enable other campuses to replicate and build upon the event.