-Background-.
[The Urgency to Nurture Digital Kids]
Our company has been active in the field of ICT and education since 1995, having experience in the establishment of Atmark Learning’s Virtual High School in 2000, and later in supporting the application for the establishment of a correspondence comprehensive high school certified as a special zone by the Corporation in 2005. Since then, he has continued to support the introduction of project-based curriculum for ICT-enabled classes at private and public junior high and high schools nationwide; in 2016, he supported the Ehime Prefectural Board of Education’s activities to introduce project-based learning at all prefectural high schools, and in 2018, Numamiyauchi High School in Iwate Town, an SDGs Future City to support the creation of regional development projects under the SDGs, as well as the provision of regional development workshops using Metaverse to elementary, middle, and high school students in the Mie Prefecture wide-area collaboration project municipalities in the movement for the 2023 Digital Rural City Nation Concept. Based on this experience, he has seen firsthand how ICT can create a desire for children to learn.
In FY2023, he was appointed by the city of Dunedin, New Zealand, to be the facilitator for the Japanese side of the project, bringing together 20 New Zealand high school students and 20 Japanese high school students online for a two-week game jam. What became apparent was the overwhelming difference between the Japanese and New Zealand high school students. New Zealand high schools have already introduced a curriculum to experience game making on UNIX, and most of the teams have created games on UNIX. The Japanese side had zero experience. Even Japanese high school students who are competitive in terms of ideas, as expected, none of them had experienced making games on UNIX. So, I advised them to create a metaverse (Roblox, Cluster, Spatial). We also confirmed that the fastest way to get as close as possible to this kind of development experience is to let the students experience game development using a metaverse.
[Start introducing the Metaverse Workshop into the school curriculum].
In FY2023, we will provide the Metaverse Workshop to elementary and junior high school students at CoderDojo Shinagawa Gotenyama, private high schools in Tokyo, and correspondence high schools certified by the Cabinet Office. In addition, a Web3 introduction course was developed as a course for vocational schools, with a cumulative total of more than 100 students. In Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, with the support of a company, he offered a Metaverse Workshop (Spatial) to the general public. In addition, we have successfully provided a curriculum for a regional development workshop in the Metaverse to the Hakodate National College of Technology in Hokkaido.
-Future Prospects
[Development into ZA project].
In parallel with the SDGs, a curriculum has been introduced at Fujimidai Junior High School in Shinagawa Ward since FY2021, in which students experience new business and product development under the theme of the SDGs, and create a pseudo supply chain for products and services registered in a database. In FY2024, we plan to conduct an experiment in which products and services registered by junior high school students in Shinagawa Ward will be introduced to the market by moving them through the shopping arcade. Currently receiving support for this move are high school students from Ehime University High School in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture; high school students from Hokkaido Hakodate National College of Technology; junior high school students from Fujimidai Junior High School in Shinagawa Ward; high school students from Yuzawa Shohoku High School in Akita Prefecture; Sakado High School affiliated with Saitama University of Arts and Sciences; and learning environments supporting events in Iwate Town, Iwate Prefecture.
[Creating Learning Opportunities for Children Supported by the Community with Corporate Participation].
We often hear from parents who are troubled by their children’s addiction to video games. We often hear from parents that their children are having trouble with game addiction, and that their children are paying for games without their permission.
[Platform]
We offer SDGs Active Local Point System “L-TanQ” for this project. You can contact us to know how to use this platform.