This experimental session investigates digital design as a mode of historical interpretation, inviting participants to explore what it means to build history rather than only write it. The session brings together two closely related projects that use Minecraft Education as a platform for historical inquiry, public memory, and civic imagination. While the historical cases differ—one focused on a nationally significant site and the other on local community history—the session is unified by a shared methodological question: How can spatial design, narrative choice, and interactivity function as historical argument?

The session is structured around short provocations, live demonstrations, participant experimentation, and collective reflection, rather than traditional paper presentations. Presenters will briefly introduce two classroom-based historical inquiry projects that treat digital worlds as interpretive texts. In the first, students investigate Monticello through multiple perspectives, including enslaved communities, and construct either historically grounded reconstructions or redesigned spaces that grapple with memory, justice, and interpretation. In the second, students research culturally significant sites in Flushing, Queens, and build a virtual neighborhood that functions as a form of public history, incorporating historical research, narrative interpretation, and sustainability-oriented redesign.

Rather than focusing on outcomes alone, the session foregrounds process and method. Participants will examine excerpts of student work—builds, NPC narratives, and design rationales—and discuss how evidence, perspective, and interpretation are embedded in spatial and narrative decisions. Attendees will then engage in a brief, guided design exercise (no technical expertise required) that asks them to prototype or outline a small historical interpretation using space, narrative, or design constraints. This activity is intended to surface questions about evidence, authorship, representation, and scale.

The session concludes with a facilitated discussion that connects participants’ experimentation to broader historiographical and pedagogical concerns, including public history, digital history, historical empathy, and the limits and possibilities of non-textual historical argumentation.

This session is designed for a broad audience, including historians interested in digital and public history, history educators across K–12 and higher education, museum professionals, and scholars concerned with historical method and interpretation. By treating digital building as an experimental historical practice, the session invites participants to reconsider how history is researched, interpreted, taught, and shared with the public.