Professor Carlos Queiroz from the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil joined the CCAT team for the month of February to support our work on GeoGames. Professor Queiroz is an associate professor of Cultural Geography with expertise in the area of geo-ethnography, community mapping and community resilience. He spent the month working with CCAT team member and fellow Brazilian, Dr. Bruno de Andrade on a variety of projects. They set up a pilot GeoGames group with students in UCD and ran 2 workshops. The workshops were attended by students from landscape architecture and planning. At the first workshop, the group played and evaluated a number of climate GeoGames. The second workshop gave students the opportunity to develop their own GeoGame. Carlo created the short video below about the workshops.
Bruno and Carlos also ran a Minecraft workshop at Bricks4Kidz in Santry for 9 to 12-year olds. The workshop explored the Fingal coastline and looked at the impacts of climate change on our environment.

They delivered 2 lectures to the UCD landscape architecture students on using GeoDesign with Minecraft and the Gamification of Landscape fieldwork. They traveled to the University of Lisbon to give a lecture on GeoDesign applied to citizen engagement in adaptive planning to climate change, and to the University of Coimbra to share some thoughts on heritage values and participation.

To round off a very busy month Carlos presented at the UCD Earth Institute coffee morning “Resilient narratives and Spaces of Hope”, which demonstrated cultural geography’s approach to provoking people to reconnect with themselves, with each other, and with the landscape.
