Minecrafting a plan

By Kevin Manne

It’s also a stepping stone to gain further certifications and advance her career.

“I had never taken online courses, but during my undergraduate studies I always did my best in summer classes because they were short and focused, and this program has a similar structure,” says Hutter. “I also like that the classes are asynchronous, so the program fits my schedule.”

Launched in fall 2023, the Online MBA program offers an innovative course structure, and professors are continuously building new ways for students to connect. 

This spring, Online MBA students in MGO 634, the program’s project management course, engaged in a whole new way — using the sandbox video game Minecraft.

Minecraft offers several ways to play, including a survival mode where players acquire resources to build their world and maintain health, and an adventure mode where players explore challenges created by others.

But it was the game’s creative mode that caught the eye of Natalie Simpson, professor of operations management and strategy, and associate dean for graduate programs, who teaches the project management course.

'“In this class you learn a portfolio of techniques to make a project successful, and we needed to give online students a way to take the concepts they’re learning and use them to work together to solve a shared problem,” says Simpson. “Minecraft’s creative mode gives us a shared digital space where students can come together in real time and take a problem from concept to conclusion. We’re not just in there playing a game.”

Hutter says she was a little apprehensive about using Minecraft at first, since she’d never played it. But her 20-year-old son helped her understand the basics.

“We talked through how to navigate, and the way the class was structured made it very easy,” she says. “We also had a ‘team doctor’ with dedicated office hours who was there to help if you were having any issues.”

For the class, each team had an assigned work area on a private Minecraft server, and the workspace was set up with familiar road names from UB’s North and South campuses, such as Mary Talbert Way, Audubon Parkway and Hayes Road.

Teams were tasked with the Underground Ballroom Challenge, where they would work together to build a copy of a structure in their space through five assignments: developing a communication plan, conducting a project pre-mortem, creating prototypes, designing a work breakdown structure and ultimately building the replica ballroom. 

Bernadine Regis, who works as a bus dispatcher for Trailways of New York in New York City, has become friends with Kim Hutter through the Online MBA program, and they were in the same group for the project management class.

“We were surprised how well we were able to work as a team, even with having people in New York, Buffalo and California,” says Regis. “But we all came together to make it work. Minecraft was the platform, everyone had a task to do and we were able to complete the project. It worked out brilliantly.”

Regis says she took the skills she developed and immediately applied them at work.

“This is a new job for me, but even in my second week I felt like I’d been at it for a month because so many of the topics we covered are helping me,” she said.

Simpson says the defining characteristic of any project is that there’s a distinct beginning and an end — and that an after-party is a tradition from project management.

So, MGO 634 students returned to Minecraft to close things out with a bang. Course leaders advanced the time to an evening setting and lit the public spaces with lanterns. 

Meanwhile, students decorated their working spaces for the event, like the Halloween theme that Hutter and Regis applied to their Underground Ballroom.

“It’s important to take a moment to celebrate and have closure, and the after-party was our way of making that happen in this class,” says Simpson. 

This course is just one example of how School of Management faculty are thinking outside the box to deliver online programs in innovative ways.