gameplay and simplicity of Minecraft, many people appreciate the textures as the not-‐so-‐complex pixels they are, and embrace this idea. Games like portal have great graphical features, but again, the simplicity is appreciated as an aspect of Minecraft. A great art project for a middle or high school art classes would be to assign certain textures to certain individuals or groups in the class. Each texture takes no more than 5 minutes to create, so with a class elected theme, each person or group could create about a dozen new textures in a short amount of time. Even sounds can be changed, but that process is a bit more complex. In about a week, without overlooking any items, a great pack could be created and even put on the Internet for others to use! An easy way to edit these textures is to use Paint or Paintbrush (PC and Mac, respectively,) allows for non-‐transparent retexturing. The look and feel of video games varies, but there’s no doubt that of simple 3D textures, Minecraft best allows for as sleek, rough, light or dark a mood as your class desires. And so, a conclusion to my artistic spiel relating to Minecraft. [Trevor Roe brings a student’s perspective to virtual education. He is a special reporter for the Virtual Education Journal -‐ VEJ.]
SIGVE Speaker Series
On Tuesday, February 19, 2013, over 25 people joined Spiff Whitfield and guest speaker John Lester for a lively discussion. John is Chief Learning Officer at ReactionGrid, a software company developing 3D simulations and multiuser virtual world platforms. His primary focus is on collaborative learning and instructional design, working with academic and business clients to develop immersive education environments. From 2005-‐2010, John worked at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. At Linden Lab he led the development of the education and healthcare markets. Watch it at: http://youtu.be/VWyBgSx0jXY and the speaker schedule at weebly site Http://sigve.weebly.com .
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