The Settlement Game
The Romans arrive in Doncaster: Day 2 of the Settlement Game event in Doncaster’s Frenchgate Centre. Architecture Week 2006.
In 2018 the Trust decided to expand its education programme by exploring how it might adopt the Settlement Game as a means to introducing Doncaster’s school children to the practicalities and creative possibilities of architecture, town planning and urban design.
The game was devised and developed by the late James Copp for the now defunct Doncaster Design Centre in 2006. Since then it has been played scores of times in the Doncaster district and beyond, with much success and evident enjoyment.
The Design Centre showcased the game during the 2006 Architecture Week celebrations when it took over a vacant shop in Doncaster’s Frenchgate Centre and invited schools to participate in designing towns in different historic periods over a week.
How the Game is played
The ‘Settlement Game’ was devised for use with primary, secondary and special school students. The aim is to work with children in the creation and development of a physical model of a human settlement as it might have evolved in England over 2500 years. Doncaster town centre is usually used as the basis for the game. In the game a modelled situation is used to simulate the real development of communities. Students are presented with card (six by three metres) laid on the floor to represent a river, marshland and a path joining two points. After a presentation on Bronze Age settlements, the first group of students is asked to design and build a three-dimensional Bronze Age settlement. Students have a variety of resources to make the buildings and reference materials depicting buildings and settlements of the time. The emphasis is on working in teams and negotiating where things, for example vegetable patches or the communal hall, should be placed. The next group of students go through the same process but focusing on Anglo-Roman times. They then overlay their design of the town in the Anglo-Roman period on top of the Bronze Age settlement. The next group design a Saxon settlement, then a Tudor settlement, a Victorian settlement through to the modern day. Thus, the design of the town changes with the ages.
Evaluation
The game was evaluated by an educational specialist from Sheffield Hallam University who investigated how the game could be developed and linked to different areas of the curriculum. The evaluation suggested that the game links to 80 per cent of subject areas and has huge potential in the National Curriculum, including mathematics, art and design, English, citizenship, geography and politics for example. What was noticed when the game was played with different cohorts of students was that it got them talking to each other and discussing and debating and thinking about their role in planning towns and how they interact with towns. James Copp observed that it was really fascinating to see those young people developing personal and negotiation skills which were really strong.
The Film
In adopting the Settlement Game as a new element of our education programme, the Trust invited James Copp to revive the game by training facilitators who would work in Doncaster schools to deliver sessions of the game. In 2019 the local XP School agreed to help by providing students to work with James to run a session of the game.
This jolly event was captured on film by Trust member and film maker Mark Waterhouse. Subsequently, James and Mark produced a promotional film which explains the game, touches on its history, variety of formats and shows it in operation at XP.
The Trust’s plans to relaunch the Settlement Game have been derailed largely by the Covid emergency. As of December 2022, the Trust has no plans to make progress with this project but the film is offered as an interesting insight into how schoolchildren can be engaged in fun and instructive exercises to become more aware off the value and dynamics of good architecture, town planning and urban design – very much at the core of Doncaster Civic Trust’s aspirations.