Flatville

Flatville Primary School is modelled directly on my very own childhood school, Anne Hathaway. From a collection of photographs in my family archive, and my own memory I was able to accurately (as many of my friends of the time will attest) re-create the school, both interior and exterior. It's a great example of how you can have students preserve the past in Minecraft by creating structures or buildings that no longer exist, or are perhaps in danger of being destroyed. You can view a walkthrough of my build on my YouTube channel. 

Flatville town hall started it's existance as a small kiosk. It was designed to hold several NPCs that offered a synopsis and quick teleport to the activities in Flatville. After several years of expansion, the kiosk became quite overcrowded. Structures were relocated to clear space for the new building, and the new town hall was constructed to house all the NPCs. 

Flatville Castle was inspired largely by the White Tower in the Tower of London, England although with some significant embellishments on my part to demonstrate different elements of castle construction over the ages. Originally the castle was a single wall tower, built to demonstrate several features of medieval castles. It was largely rebuilt and massively expanded over a period of three months to better represent a traditional castle. NPCs and posters and boards are located throughout to provide context and information. It's still a popular spot for virtual field trips, Hide n' Seek events and even has secret catacombs buried under the site.  

Flatville Abbey is the oldest surviving structure in Flatville at it's original location. It was mostly inspired by St. Michael's Abbey in Glastonbury, England (again with a few embellishments). It was built to demonstrate medieval church architecture for a religous studies class. There might even be a secret crypt under the structure... most structures in Flatville have at least one, and usually several secret spaces just waiting to be discovered. 

"Explore, Learn, Discover... Investigate, Experiment and Share" is the motto of Flatville Musarium. The museum was built to house my redstone and command block encyclopedia, along with a terrarium, aquarium, library, cafe, tutorials for both Chemistry and Magic and ancient ruins beneath the structure. I quickly recognized it wasn't close to being big enough to home everything I wanted in it. Still, it's a cool place to hang out, learn, and play Hide n' Seek.  

Flatville Jail (or the Attitude Rehabilitation & Behavioral Reflection Facility) was originally much smaller and served as a place to separate students in multiplayer mode when they were not demonstrating the best behaviour. I quickly recognized that I needed to improve the facility if I also wanted to improve behaviour. The facility now boasts a garden, fancy cells with pets, and is also essentially a complex escape room that students can try to escape from. The front porch is the only original element remaining. 

Flatville is a pedestrian friendly community, and features only pavement (sidewalks) and foot paths. Of course, you may want to get around to the larger attractions faster, so I've built a monorail system to whisk you from site to site. The station and system is designed to be accessible, and appear inclusive and fun. It contains an observation tower, a cafe, lifts, an outside pation and fountain and a fancy restaurant. It's a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, six-car monorail, the track won't bend, and their aren't possums living in the carts.  

Where do Flatvillians live? Well, there was a bit of a housing shortage until I dropped in the accessibly and sustainably built, Flatville Flats (called Fulbeck House). It contains six spacious, one bedroom flats, with living room, bathroom, powder room, full kitchen and porch. Atop the flats is a greenhouse for growing produce.

In Flatville lore, the full scale replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tourist attraction. It utterly dwarfs Flatville, and most of the other structures combined would quite fit quite comfortably inside it. In reality, it was constructed to demonstrate the concepts of perimeter, area and volume for maths students, while also including a little history. The interior is highly embellished, and contains a number of "Indiana Jones" type traps. The structure itself is mostly hollow, and contains other secret structures that are accessible via entry points hidden around Flatville.   

Orson's Farm is where Flatvillian's get most of their food from. Some of the structures are based on old English farm buildings, while the main barn and house are inspired by old farm structures from Southern Ontario.  It was originally built across from the Flatville Town Hall, but was moved to make room for the Monorail station and Flatville Flats. I talk a lot about moving structures in Minecraft... this is all done with a tool called Amulet which allows for easy copying and pasting, rotating and undoing if you make a mistake!

Pipi Longstocking is the protagonist in Astrid Lindgren's series of children's stories. The structure was added to Flatville as a demonstration of how you could create a student literary activity, where students would use descriptive passages in the narrative to help create the buildings in those stories. Students could then add other details, descriptions and quotes from the story using slates, posters and boards.

"Why do you have a horse on your porch?"

"He'd be in the way in the kitchen, and he doesn't like the parlour."

There is a Star Trek inspired starship hidden away in Flatville! It has a bridge, shuttle bay, transporter room, sickbay, brig, torpedo bay, engineering, auxiliary control, a mess hall, crew quarters, and numerous passage ways, Jefferies tubes and other mechanical spaces. But, something is wrong with the turbolifts and there's no way to know where you'll end up if you use them!

I had no education purpose in mind when I created the USS Reliant, it was purely for my own creative enjoyment, and students love playing Hide n' Seek here.   

In this screenshot of Flatville, you can see a few of the houses, and structures not explicitly mentioned above. 

Flatville is still one of my favourite builds, and is long overdue for some new buildings. What should I build next?