 Let us take you on a journey. A journey away from our joyful and comfortable world, the ever-populated with ever-bright and cheerful community of like-minded museums and professionals, just like all of us in this room today. This world, our world, is also known to the initiated few as the overworld. But it has a dark and mysterious companion, a world called Nether. Nether, a vast and incomprehensible void stretching as far as our imagination is a place where many unknowns lurk. Mobs of youngsters, kids even, alien to us in our way of thinking, engaged in the questionable pleasures of mining ethereal substances, combining them in an altamist fission to create ever-new concoctions and congregating with their fellow companions to build entire universes unfathomable to us overworld dwellers. To get to this world, oops, to meet these kids, we will need to enter a portal connecting our overworld with their Nether world. A portal made of deep purple and black blocks known for their high-blast resistance and strength, which of course, as you can see or not see, is obsidian. Now, join us when we tell of our courageous adventures into this ever-expanding universe of pixels, which is also known as Minecraft. So what we thought we'd do to kick things off is to give you a quick heads-up what Minecraft is actually all about if you have been living under a rock or, should I say, block for the last couple of years. It's a very popular video game with kids and adults alike and has a very active and engaged communities of users sharing their creations. The best way to think of it is probably virtual Lego. So it's a game where you can create anything by using textured building blocks, mining resources, which are just building blocks with other textures, and crafting new materials by combining two building blocks with different textures to make a new one. Say you have a wooden block and a steel block and you combine it and it gives you a pickaxe. Now, users create a lot of things in this game from models to landscapes, entire worlds even, which can be explored, shared and played in. And because it's so popular with kids, schools have increasingly started picking it up and using it as a learning tool, essentially trying to make kids forget that they're learning, which of course is what we tried and do with this little project of ours. And as it happens, getting back to the idea of the obsidian portals connecting our world to their world, we had just the right ingredient in our collections to build us one of those portals. Isn't that right, Wendy? It is nails. So let me describe this aha moment that we had when we knew we could link our Auckland Museum collections with the world of Minecraft. Picture this, a room full of 12-year-olds are passing around some of the volcanic material. For some, the learning is as dry and dull as the rocks themselves. Thomas, Scoria, Basalt is exchanging hands, but when the black volcanic glass appears, something changes. Faces light up when the word obsidian is revealed. Engagement heightens and the word Minecraft spread around the room like a virus. It was in that moment that we knew we were onto something. We had made the connection to Minecraft and we were going to use it to aid engagement and learning. It was going to be a great portal, one that connected their world with ours. So it got us wondering, what else might we use Minecraft for? What other potential did it have? Could we use it as part of our World War I Centenary Program? Was it possible to link Minecraft to our World War I collections and help retail this period of history and the lives of these men behind me? Might it be the answer to an ongoing challenge that we had with Generation Y? A generation equipped with gadgets and technology who are online 24-7, 365 days of the year. This is a generation of young people who may have no known connection to war and only know war through film and digital gangmen. We decided yes, we would use Minecraft, we would meet Generation Y in their world and it would be part of an education program with collections at the heart. One that focused on deepening the understanding of what it was like for the New Zealand soldier and the events that they took part in. And with that, Gallipoli and Minecraft was born. So we had the right tool, Minecraft, we had the right project, World War I Centenary and we had a defined audience, Generation Y. Now, what we didn't have was the knowledge to actually make it happen. Turns out, we didn't really know much about Minecraft other than hey, it's pretty cool and the kids love it and we should really do something. It quickly transpired that we needed partners. So we started to talk to our colleagues and ask them whether they knew something about Minecraft and we pretty much always got the same answer. So I'll go and talk to Joe's kid. He's really into Minecraft. Oh, Lisa's boy, digs Minecraft, doesn't do anything else. So we quickly realized we need to talk to the kids because they are the experts in this game. So we went out and looked for schools that already been using Minecraft in their classrooms as a starting point and we're lucky enough to come across Elferston College in South Auckland who were running or are running a Minecraft club at their school and they turned out to be pivotal for the success of this project because they were the ones who helped us get the world going in the first place by taking raw GIS data which you can see on the left and creating a depth mat from that data, then running that depth mat through a terraforming algorithm and then loading that world into Minecraft to become the canvas for the project that they'd be running with us which is basically digging the trenches, building the structures that you'll be seeing later on this presentation. So we had that side covered which was great but we still had a problem because we still needed a server, we needed to set up a server, we needed to configure a server, we needed to run it, we needed to deploy the custom world, we needed to build a community around it and our IT guys weren't having it. So we went and talked to Media Design School who are just across from us and they run a game development course and as part of that they have an active Minecraft group and a Minecraft platform which is the pick and travel website so they had all the architecture in place for us to just really plunk in our world and get started. But they did a bit more for us. They also created custom mods, texture packs to make sure that the color of the dirt is actually closer to the color of the dirt on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They replaced the standard brick walls with sandbags and just overall managed to create more of a world where one look as far as Minecraft allowed it. So now that we knew we had all of our pieces together and we could actually do it it was time for us to think about our approach really. How would we make this pan out over the next couple of months? Which of course is what Wendy and her team excelled at. So basically it's a three stage approach. The first stage is the building of the world. So that's obviously by those students Niels just mentioned from Alfreston College. Stage two will occur at Auckland Museum in line with Gallipoli 100. It will be an exhibition that showcases the world, the process and the work of the students. And stage three is going to be the public release of the world. So this is going to happen at the same time as the exhibition. It's going to be open to individuals and schools alike. And it's going to be accompanied with an education pack that will help you with some ideas about how you can use the world and get the best out of it to gain an understanding about Gallipoli. So let's look closer at the approach that we used for some of these building weekends. We wanted to draw on our staff's expertise and our museum collection. So each building weekend involved an education session that looked at specific locations and the events that occurred there. So obviously we started with Anzac Cove and the landing itself and the days that followed. We then went down to Cape House where the New Zealand inventory were called in as reinforcements for the Allies. Then we returned to the areas around Anzac Cove and the landmarks that were associated with the August Offensive and the evacuation. During each building session, the students had an amazing opportunity to get close with our collection objects, have these hands-on experiences and an effort to understand the events and what life was like for those soldiers. They took part in re-enactments to gain an understanding of military strategy and they examined 100-year-old photographs, maps, diary entries and letters to find out what life was like, the living conditions, the landscape and the objects that they were going to build. We also drew on the strengths of Minecraft. Now Minecraft is a really good tool for collaborative learning. The act of building does not have to be just done as an individual. You can actually work in teams. And so we divided our school kids into building teams and they were responsible for building a set object like a dreadnought or an area like, say, Quinn's Post. These teams used their knowledge that they had gained from working with staff and referencing those collection materials to decide how they were going to build. So they worked collaboratively to come up with a design plan, they tested it out, sometimes they reconsidered it and rebuilt and that was all done collaboratively as part of a team. For example, if we look here, we have Lieutenant Colonel Fenwick who was a medical officer at Gallipoli. He kept an amazing diary and this is an extract from his diary which was a sketch. He'd captured Anzac Cove as it would have been 10 to 12 days after the landing. So in this sketch, his reference locations like dugouts, communication stations, clearing stations, Walkers Ridge and those locations were divided between the students, between those teams and they set to work. They cross-referenced those locations with our collection materials, so those 100-year-old maps and the photographs. The photographs gave them an insight into building materials they might use and how they might have to reshape the landscape. Now it's really important to note we were not looking for photo realism and this re-enactment. They were building a digital Lego after all. The world is an interpretation of a series of resources and in fact those engaging with the world in stage 3 may interpret those quite differently. But it's really important to note these students were engaged. They really learnt about a period of history that perhaps they wouldn't have been interested in otherwise. So let's take a closer look at some of their magic. So we talked a little bit earlier about that collaborative learning. You can see little avatars flying around the screen. So those are the amount of students that were working on one object and as you can see sometimes they're un-building what they had done. They're obviously referencing collections and re-thinking their design plan. So this here is the landing beach as it would have been 10 to 12 days after. So obviously a lot of supplies fueling the front line. Again you can see them collaboratively building, re-thinking and re-building again. So how do we know we were successful? Easy. This is the best we could have ever had in my life. On that note, thank you very much for your time.