1. 14-15.2.2013 in Tampere, Finland
Núñez, P. pnunezgo@ccinf.ucm.es
Lacasa Pilar. p.lacasa@uah.es
Complutense University
Alcalá University
Spain

2. SimCity and Metropolis:
New and old media in children’s lives

3. GOALS:
• The main goal of the project is to encourage
the development of new forms of literacy
within the framework of a participatory
culture in relation to new communication
practices supported by old and new
technologies. (Jenkins ,2010)
• To show how a literacy in old media
contributes to improve the literacy in new
ones.

4. • How young people create cultural products
and interact with them, which allows us to
explore how they use multiple discourses
• How different ways of learning are useful for
the classroom and for getting different skills

5. • For us, Children are authors and they create
multimodal texts using new technologies to
communicate an idea. They change from
receivers to producers.

6. • Furthermore we are interested in exploring
videogames as expressions of popular culture
that are present in the daily lives of
children(Buckingham&Willet,2009)
• We follow also James Gee (Gee &Hayes,2011)
that thinks videogames could be instruments
for learning ,because they involve specific
forms of thought.

7. • By making machinima (Nitsche,2011), young
people have to control what happens on the
screen as directors, cameramen and
filmmakers in a virtual world, and how they
and their characters assume many other
different roles in the mass media universe.

8. • Both technologies and forms of
communication are dependent on each other
and concepts such as machinima, convergence
of platforms or transmedia experiences are
concepts that help in the analysis of new
media experiences.

9. Methodology

10. THE WORKSHOP
10 sesssions in secondary school
• The director explanation :Metropolis
• To explore
• Children as producers
• New literacies: montage

11. • By comparing Metropolis and the trailer of
SimCity (2013) in the classroom, the children
machinima productions could contribute to
drawing awareness to the rules of transmedia
phenomena.

16. • The Sims is one of the first games that
provided resources to create machinima
productions. Players control characters and
the game has the potential to create digital
performance, which forces an awareness of
the games possibilities and its rules
(Jenkins, 2006)

20. • Analysis of the students’ productions shows
that they have faced problems that were not
new to those who build stories using
audiovisual discourses. (Lacasa,2009)

21. • Reflecting on what would be the best way to
help them compose the film and assemble
different multimodal pieces and working
together helping each other.

22. Some Conclusions,..
• We anticipated that the students would face
similar problems to those confronted by early
filmmakers.
• We considered that some film
productions, particularly a masterworks of
expressionist cinema (an example of analogical
culture), could help machinima authors solve
specific problems they found when they needed
to combine multimodal pieces to construct
specific meanings for both themselves as creators
and their potential audiences as receivers

23. • Young people support each other and create
collectively and individually, but the
community is the background of creation
• It would have another meaning if it could not
be shared.
• The fact that technology is being used does
not mean that young people understand the
rules of discourses through which people
communicate.

25. • http://www.filmeducation.org/metropolis/
• http://www.ea.com/simcity
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckTWKSjy
aO8&feature=plcp
• http://ea.com