Who Are We?
“Palimpsest Cities: Gamification and Storytelling for Architectural History and Cultural Heritage Awareness” is an EU co-funded higher education project, conducted by four partners from Alanya, Istanbul, Bucharest and Volos, between December 2022 and April 2025.
Our aim is to create architectural history and cultural heritage awareness for all layers of the society by using gamification and stroytelling techniques. And we believe that this will become a new educational model!
Why Gamification?
Not only humans, but many creatures learn through play during infancy/childhood. They make their first practices about life by playing. Because play is one of the best ways of learning. Both the process is enjoyable and the results are permanent. For this reason, we place gamification at the forefront of our project.
Why Storytelling?
Stories are one of the best ways of transmitting knowledge across generations, especially when writing was not yet in use. When any information is conveyed in a story, it becomes much more permanent, it is engraved in the minds with its details, and the listeners internalize it more easily. For this reason, we have chosen storytelling as one of the main elements of our project.
A New Educational Model
Our primary goal in this project is to raise awareness of architectural history and cultural heritage and to make it permanent… We do this by developing an interdisciplinary, flexible, modular and hybrid course using gamification and storytelling techniques. However, this new course will not only address the university level or only architecture students. We are actually designing a new educational model that will reach all layers of society, from children to the elderly, from the disabled to low-income people… And we aim to turn this into a model that can be adapted to other fields.
How We Do This?
We will first design a new, learner-based course for architecture departments with a genuine, innovative, hybrid, interdisciplinary approach. Then, we will implement this course in two multi-layered, at Alanya University and Istanbul Technical University.
After making necessary modifications, we will also make public implementations in four partner cities. We will also provide a guide to adapt the course for other target groups, from children to elderly, and for other fields/disciplines.
Expected Outputs
1
New curricula (Palimpsest Cities course) with a guide to adapt/modify it for other target groups
6
Implementations of the new course at higher education level at two universities
10+
Public implementations in four parter cities
Our Motivation
We believe that protection of architectural and cultural heritage should start from the bottom, not from top. The only way to protect our historic and multilayered cities is to make everyone embrace their cities through getting familiar with them, knowing them and above all getting in touch with them.
Although we designed this project as a higher education project since most of the project team is from academia; we aim to work hard to make its outputs reach every single member of the society by providing necessary adaptations to disseminate the results to anyone.
Our Partnership
“Avrupa Komisyonu’nun bu yayının hazırlanmasına verdiği destek, sadece yazarların görüşlerini yansıtan içeriğin onaylandığı anlamına gelmez ve Komisyon burada yer alan bilgilerin herhangi bir şekilde kullanılmasından sorumlu tutulamaz.”