Growing up is a wonderful adventure that no one can predict. It is a journey and regardless of age and background sometimes you need expertise and other’s wisdom to better guide and face the issues you encounter along the way. Encountering and working through obstacles, challenges and diversity is the key to unlocking new opportunities. This idea has guided META [Metodologie Educative Territorio Ambiente] since 1991 when our Meet and Code organizer from Italy started their first summer camps in Cascina Costa Alta in the Monza Park, the biggest fenced city park in Europe, located near Milan in Italy.
Today META’s activities have expanded, connecting a few worlds; school and free time, city and nature, family and business, good times and hardship and discomfort and hospitality.
In 2019, META started to include STEM and coding activities into their educational projects. Meet and Code provided additional motivation as it combines both STEM and coding activities.
San Rocco 3.0 event aims to build a guide to help communities re-discover their local neighborhood - the San Rocco district of Monza, using a free augmented reality platform (Metaverse) that requires coding elements in order to build settings that drive users through interactive experiences.
During the event children were involved with unplugged coding activity, such as drawing and adding content to flow diagrams. Older students guys indeed started using Metaverse for the first time; creating geo-located experiences, testing the results in real time and fine tuning the work of younger coders.
"Ah, wow! When we can see a 3D avatar appearing upon our desk, that’s cool!"
"Is it really this easy to create this augmented reality thing?"
The project is still ongoing, because of a group of enthusiastic, young coders among the educational center users. Augmented reality is becoming more familiar and used among teachers and their students and this can open up to new possibilities and Metaverse platform is performing good thus far.
“We are happy to have a new scalable educational tool we can use in future projects that could include users from local libraries and schools”
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