How did you get the idea for this project?

Marilyn: He told me about the possibility to make a virtual reality scene. With my 8th graders, we were just doing the American Revolution. So we thought: What if we brought the battles from the book to life?

By “bringing to life”, you mean building virtual models of these battles?

Keven: When people ask me what we did with this project, I like to give the example of the old shoe box diorama. It’s like that — only that students don’t have to go out to the store and buy popsicle sticks.

What did the lessons look like?

Marilyn: Mr. Rinaman came down first to give the students a little technical introduction to CoSpaces. He came back two times after that to follow up. On the whole, they had a couple of weeks to work on the project.

Some students were much better than others. They really went back in and added very specific details.

Where did they get those details from? How did they find out what the battle scene could have looked like?

Marilyn: They used their digital textbooks. We let them chose one of five battles.

Otherwise they might have gone too far off — and who knows what they might have been doing. This is where we started.