CityScope Project

Among CityScope's areas of focus are the prototyping of learning tools that people may use in virtual environments, and the connection of these environments to existing tools and cultural resources, including those of Columbia University. It looks at these environments as the places to which a growing global learning portal, enabled by the Internet and other technologies, will lead.

To accomplish these goals, CityScope has been developed to create a series of settings that have real and the virtual layers. Through work in a virtual layer, people will find tools, places, and formats for interaction that extend the range of experience that non-virtual settings offer. From another point of view, the project explores a concrete-to-abstract continuum of forums for thought, dialog, concept formation, and expressive and creative work. The following virtual/real juxtapositions, with their virtual spaces and non-virtual counterparts, are currently being created as part of the CityScope Project's development of an overall setting that will help people explore within the scope of this continuum.

Magical Spaces at the Columbia K-8 School
While the Columbia University K-8 School is currently being built at its physical site at the corner of Broadway and 110th street, it is being modeled in virtual space in a form that will extend the real environment's functionality and architecture in ways that cannot occur in the physical world. Students and staff will be able to meet and work in these virtual spaces, and to combine creative and exploratory activities they take part in there with the activities they take part in in parallel real settings. The school will develop and conduct research in the use of 'virtual manipulatives' that help students embody abstract concepts, help them develop abstractions from exploratory activities with concrete materials, and contribute to broadening and deepening a constructivist and expressive environment for students as they engage in work in all of the school's areas of study.

Re-envisioning and Designing Lower Manhattan
Bringing their thoughts and feelings about the 09/11/02 tragedy to this project, high school students are working with virtual and real materials to develop personal visions of what might be built in lower Manhattan. Moving through several design stages over a ten week period, they will create virtual multi-user environments within the framework of a model of the blocks surrounding the World Trade Center. The tools students use will allow them to embody their particular interests in the architecture they design, with form, words, sounds, and music. The project will attempt to track its degrees of success as a setting to help participants embody their responses to the tragedy, and will focus on the consideration of several aspects of work in virtual environments, and balanced engagement with virtual and real materials and settings, that might be developed to deepen their value in constructivist learning that involves self expression.