USP Students Get Creative and Recreate UTown Virtual Experience in Minecraft for Freshmen Orientation Programme
In July and August 2020, the University Scholars Club executed the USP e-Freshmen Orientation Programme (FOP) with commendable effort and resounding success. The FOP team defied the challenges of a strictly no face-to-face programme, and totally redefined the orientation experience for incoming USP freshmen. While the team covered the usual ‘grounds’ (e.g. familiarising freshmen with professors and staff, our academic life, the USP-home faculty connection, our residential living experience and community life), they incorporated Minecraft this time round – a video game that allows players to explore infinite worlds and build anything. In the process, the team also collaborated with our neighbouring colleges to recreate possibly the first UTown virtual experience.
To learn more about what our students did and how they did it, check out these two articles (complete with visuals and a video), first published by the NUS Office of Student Affairs.
USP Students Recreate a New UTown Virtual Experience One Block at a Time
Note that this article was penned after the USP Orientation Camp (3 to 5 Jul) and before USP Orientation Week (28 to 29 Jul & 5 to 7 Aug). This article was first published on OSA Stories here on 5 Aug. Contributed by Le Khuc Hoang Uyen, NUS student majoring in Communications and New Media.
Game mode on.
Defying the challenges of no face-to-face Orientation programme is the e-Orientation 2020 Committee from the University Scholars’ Programme (USP) who reside at Cinnamon Residential College. The group of students has literally upgraded their game and redefined their Orientation Camp (OCamp) experience for incoming freshmen.
Understanding the need to create a space for incoming freshmen to interact and bond with one another, the committee came up with hosting Minecraft for their OCamp – a collaborative video game that allows players to explore infinite worlds and build everything from the simplest of homes to the grandest of castles.
This is how they went out of their way to have a memorable Orientation.
The “Amazing Race” game recreates the college’s entire interior, with each room being a different station in the game. Freshmen get to play with fellow students, while familiarising themselves with the college’s infrastructure.
What is the point of playing Minecraft if you cannot get creative? The committee at USP knew it better than anyone. They created fictional spaces for the freshmen to enjoy team-building games and even build their own worlds.
Emerge yourself in a completely different space, built exclusively for the game of “Escape Room”, and work with teammates to find the clues to escape and win. If one is a bit tired of the indoors, then welcome to the outdoor space in “Island Race”. Conquer the mountains and race through the terrains to be the first team to relay and win the game. Be careful - disturbers from the other teams may want to obstruct participants!
Want to get a bit more competitive? Try “War Game”. Students get to battle opponents to capture the flag and claim victory for their team.
Finally, to the most exciting part of the game, where freshmen can create their own reality – “Cinnamon Island” and “Building time”. Build their own landmark, erect their own fortress and boast to their friends about their impressive virtual buildings, like what these teams have done below!
And if these beautiful visuals still cannot satisfy participants’ curiosity, then take a look at the video below for a player’s point of view video. The college is planning to expand this version to include more stations for their Orientation Week. Have fun and keep an eye out for more interesting e-FOP activities from USP and NUS!
Building an Authentic Orientation Experience on a Virtual Platform
Note that this article was penned after USP Orientation Week (28 to 29 Jul & 5 to 7 Aug). This article was first published on OSA Stories here on 14 Aug. Contributed by Le Khuc Hoang Uyen, NUS student majoring in Communications and New Media.
Four residential colleges (RCs), Tembusu, Cinnamon (USP), College of Alice & Peter Tan (CAPT), and Residential College 4 (RC4), all built almost to exact scale and design – check.
The grass patch – check.
Long stretches of walking way and surrounding buildings – check and check.
In front of you appears the signature University Town (UTown), a hallmark of the campus life at the National University of Singapore.
However, none of that is real.
Whatever you have just seen is purely a visual artwork of the UTown Minecraft project, a collaborative game created by the four RCs as part of the immersive e-Freshmen Orientation Programme (e-FOP) 2020 @ NUS.
When the teamwork makes the dream work
It started when Cinnamon College (USP) decided they wanted to host Minecraft game for their e-FOP. Chia Kai Xin, Freshmen Orientations Projects Director, reached out to other Freshmen Orientation Camp Project Directors (PDs), Zachary Tan Zewei from Tembusu, Chin Keen Tat from CAPT and Goh Pei Zhi from RC4, to ask if they were interested in scaling up the project to include the whole UTown.
Upon knowing that Residential College 4 built their own Minecraft for Open Day, it was a pure moment of “Great minds think alike”. The PDs swiftly recruited their team and launched themselves into one of the most impressive collaborative efforts at e-FOP.
The game arenas recreated almost exactly all areas in UTown, with each building preserving their own internal infrastructure – floor structure, common areas and residential rooms. The aim was for the incoming freshmen to play games within the RC, and through that, bond with each other and familiarise themselves with the college as well.
Tay Kiat Jun, the Minecraft Project Director for O-Week at Cinnamon (USP) and a year-2 Mechanical Engineering student, said: “I love how our Minecraft project started out as an offhand suggestion that became a serious consideration as we brainstormed ways to give the freshmen a fun and engaging experience.”
Goh Pei Zhi, also Minecraft Project Director at RC4 and year-2 Computational Biology student, commented: “Since we are unable to bring freshmen into UTown, we’ve decided to bring UTown to the freshmen instead, allowing them to venture and explore around the campus despite the current distancing measures.”
Pursuing a bold idea in a pressing time…
Of course, a bold idea always guarantees a challenging journey, and the UTown Minecraft team knew it. It was not an easy feat to design the entire UTown, let alone hosting and maintaining a server for hundreds of freshmen.
Lim Wei Liang, the Minecraft Project Director for O-camp at Cinnamon (USP), explained the technical aspect in an interview with us. It was important for the team to have multiple rounds of stress-testing the server, checking the games for glitches and running the actual camp with all stakeholders, in order to ensure early trouble-shooting and smooth running of the game.
The team also agreed that coordinating with and getting all stakeholders on board (house committees, orientation game leaders, etc) was also challenging, especially “when people had reservations about the effectiveness of online orientation” said Kai Xin, a Year 2 Quantitative Finance major.
… and creating a journey that is worth every moment
Yet, with their sheer determination, the team pressed on. They formed a Telegram chatgroup to keep each other updated and maintained open communication about the progress of the project. The project was completed within two months and would be launched in late July to early August.
For RCs that have already launched the project, the game received positive feedbacks from the freshmen, with most complimenting the experience to be “innovative”, “well-planned”, and “a refreshing way to bond with each other”.
Joe Wei, an incoming freshman at Cinnamon (USP), even considered Minecraft “one of the best platforms to host an e-FOP”, given how “[hardly] anything else comes close to it in terms of openness and being able to accommodate 200+ people at once”
For the team, the journey was a fulfilling one, and the freshmen’s positive experience provided huge affirmation.
Zachary Tan Zewei, also Minecraft Project Director at Tembusu and a Year 3 History student, commented: “I’m glad that the university is willing to support new ways of creating such [authentic] experiences.”
“It was certainly a joyful experience, as the collaboration let us reimagine our spaces and how we resonated with them,” he said.