Child's play: Young people explore engineering through Minecraft

Inspiring more young people with Minecraft

Discover the first stage of this project, which in 2023 empowered school students to design their perfect street through the magic of Minecraft and a little help from local authority engineers who design borough streets.

In March 2024, Sustrans partnered with Westminster City Council (WCC) to deliver school street transformations using Minecraft workshops as a collaborative design tool in five primary schools across the borough.

We used the results of a Healthy Streets audit of the streets around each school to spark discussion with school children across Year 3 to Year 6 on their perception of their school street.

We used the Healthy Streets Indicators to agree with them on variety of design features that would improve their school street. Each pupil then had the opportunity to come up with their own design for their school street, using a Minecraft base model built by the Sustrans team.

Using children's innate creativity to design streets

Pupils were able to quickly produce creative ideas that varied in themes from colourful seating areas to adventurous play-on-the-way designs, giant trees, urban farms, rain canopies, public libraries and a variety of welcome signs.

The Sustrans team facilitated a group debate based on the main themes that came up in the pupils’ designs, generating a list of priorities of design themes for each school.

The Sustrans engineers and urban designers then fed these key themes into ambitious concept design proposals for the streets surrounding each school, including road space reallocation to support pupils’ health and growth.

Westminster City Council will be incorporating key features from the proposals in the consultation and overall school street design.

Making behaviour change real for younger generations

"Sustrans were commissioned to deliver Minecraft sessions across five of our schools to support capturing the pupil voice throughout Westminster’s School Streets Programme," said Carla Leowe, road safety officer from Westminster City Council transport policy team. 

"They coordinated the bookings and their engineering expertise shone through with not only the pupils but staff at each of the schools.

"All pupils were engaged with having first-hand input into the area they frequent near-enough everyday which was empowering to see.

"This programme has not only helped pupils understand highway schemes through gamification but allowed officers to deliver a scheme that aims to make real behavioural change for younger generations and all of those that use our streets regularly. Thank you to the team!"

Work with us to give many more UK schools and engineers this opportunity

We invite you to take the next step towards meaningful youth engagement and inclusive engineering projects.

Let's start a conversation about how we can work together to create positive change and amplify the voices of under-served people in our communities.