iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

A Regina high school teacher is using the international smash hit video game Minecraft to teach his students math.

"I was inspired by my own kids — seeing them play Minecraft and building things," said Dean Vendramin, who teaches math and photography at O'Neill high school.

Minecraft involves building structures out of blocks.

"It's almost like playing with digital Lego," Vendramin said.

Jeremy is autistic. Jeremy was passionate about his interests but not super thrilled to explore outside of his comfort zone. “Traditional” evaluation methods produced results indicating Jeremy was not very bright academically. But there was something about Jeremy. He was brilliant in his own right. It was our definition of compliance that needed next steps.

Jeremy was introduced to Minecraft in his grade 8 year of elementary school. Having spent nine years in the system that wasn’t working for him, his parents were desperate to find a solution before high school. Jeremy was obsessed with Lego but had not used Minecraft before. It didn’t take long to see him beam with excited as he created structures and constructed growing patterns.

What we recognized (we, as in our school staff) is that Minecraft had almost become a voice for Jeremy. He could build things to demonstrate understanding, use signs to express language and create video clips to narrate his worlds. Jeremy was able to participate in math class by building patterns and structures to scale. He could visualize settings for his story and bring them to life in what Seymour Papert used to describe as a Mathland.