Evaluating a Game-Based Workshop for Youth Urban Design Using Open-Source Tools

This evaluation examines a single-group, open-source game-based workshop in which Japanese sixth-graders, and in a related account 36 students, redesigned a Yokohama park using PLATEAU 3D city data, Blender, and Godot. The study's purpose is to assess whether such a workshop can foster civic and design-related attitudes among young people in a machizukuri (community-based urban planning) context. Its central thesis is that accessible open-source tools combined with real urban data can produce meaningful short-term shifts in youth engagement, while the authors acknowledge that the design cannot establish causation.

The most consistent quantitative findings concern attitudinal change. Pre/post Wilcoxon tests showed significant increases in willingness to participate in civic life (d = 0.66) and interest in urban design careers (d = 0.89), both surviving Bonferroni correction. Site interest and perceived tool difficulty showed no robust change. Conversation analysis revealed a marked shift from operational talk toward design-oriented discussion, with the design-to-operation ratio rising from 0.82 to 1.96. Participants rated the game-mode feature most highly, at 90.9% agreement, while camera control was the most frequently cited difficulty.

The evaluation's scope is narrow: a single cohort of Japanese students in Yokohama, assessed over a short period without a control group, and with participants clustered within 12 groups. These constraints mean the results describe associations and immediate effects rather than durable or generalizable outcomes. The work is best understood as a feasibility and exploratory evaluation that identifies promising directions for future controlled, longitudinal research on game-based urban design education.