Longhouses!

By Madden and Masah

Our first project in Minecraft was to build Native American longhouses. Before we could start building, we had to read about the Native Americans that lived in Michigan. We read about the there fires - the Ojibway, the Ottawa, and the Potowatomi. 

We had to use math to make our Longhouses. We built them to scale, which means that they had to be 200 feet long and 25 feet wide. Since we couldn't make them that long, we had to figure out what we could do. We calculated that if each block in Minecraft was five feet, then we would need 40 blocks for the length and the width of the longhouses had to be 5 blocks. 

Inside we had to make sure the longhouses were like they really were back then. We had a rubric that helped us with that. The longhouse had to be divided for different families. Each section had to have a fire, and there had to be an opening above the fire for smoke. They also had to have a raised sleeping platform and storage. It was a really fun project!