Applicable Representation of City Centres with Heritage Importance (APPROACH) has emerged from a multisector cooperation containing heritage, architectural and cultural organisations, municipality with architectural and media enterprises and a VET institution with media classes. The main objective of this transnational consortium is to assemble an online learning platform as an open educational resource, targeting firstly architectural, art historian and urban analyst students and parallelly media and web designer students in VET and on other levels.
The main output of the programme is a 4-piece collection of interactive 3d city maps showing the centres of Edinburgh, Granada, Budapest and Lublin as non-formal educational tools. The creation of the animated models is based on a scientifically carried-out historical and urbanistic research collecting all available source materials, like old maps, perspectives and archive texts to be able to rebuild and represent the selected time periods of the cities – from their foundation to modern times. This approach gives the possibility to freely explore the urban environment in both space and time, collecting knowledge about the monuments and urban textile through interaction with the models. The multilingual content of the city maps will make them act as 3d visual dictionaries and can also function as content and language integrated learning resources.
As a result of the transnationally carried-out research a comprehensive study is also assembled by the research institutions showing the outstanding materials collected together about the analysed cities and summarising the steps of the product-oriented cooperation with the architectural and media enterprises. Its main purpose is to promote the project ideas among VET institutions and relevant stakeholders and this way to contribute to the creation of further educational contents similar to the products of this project.
To help the same initiative a series of video tutorials and text descriptions is also assembled teaching about the creation of 3 dimensional interactive contents. The production of this online material is connected with a training programme also, in which blended mobility of VET students takes place combining virtual involvement with short-term physical mobilities. As a part of the training the media and web designer students are involved in learning, testing and this way into the creation of the final resource. The chapters of the material are to teach useful technics and methods about 3d modelling, composing animations and programming interactive functions in co-operation with for profit firms. In this way the training leads to the recognition of the latest trends of CAD, BIM and game development technologies, providing knowledge and competences with remarkable labour market relevance.
With different techniques and target groups, all the outputs of the project provide working models and pathways for the easily intellegible visualisation of urban environment and monuments as well as for the integration of digital competences to the development of further educational resources.