via Kayla Miller at Mlive.com
VICKSBURG, MI — When Austin Roberson sat down at the computer and fired up Minecraft, he was not at home playing video games during summer vacation. Roberson was in a classroom on a Thursday afternoon at Vicksburg High School.
Students enrolled in Intro to Design, one of many engineering-type courses offered by Greg Mills, are using a video game most play for fun as educational software in their classrooms.
Using the building game, students created a virtual tour of their entire high school, including classroom spaces and the building’s exterior. Their next project is to create a tour of the old Vicksburg paper mill.
Mills, a teacher with the Education for Employment program at the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency, said when this class was first opened to students four years ago, students would try to play Minecraft during class.
“Instead of telling them, ‘You can’t play,’ we gave them projects,” Mills said. Students are using blueprints, photographs and satellite footage to create, in Minecraft, an exact replica of the old paper mill.
Click here to read the rest of the story at Mlive.com!
Here is an additional interview from the class courtesy of Kalamazoo News and WWMT.com
