As puffs of smoke rise from a fire inside a kʷikʷəƛəm (Kwikwetlem) big house, middle school student Elsa Romey reaches over to help her twin sister Maya turn soft cedar wood into a box with an inlay-carved lid.

But the Romey twins and their classmates can't smell the fragrant cedar planks of the building, nor feel the warmth of its central fire, nor hear the calls of the eagles soaring outside.

The best-selling game Minecraft allows multiple players to create structures, objects and characters using clusters of digital blocks within a deliberately pixelated, three-dimensional environment.

That popularity of the game among students is being tapped by schools in Coquitlam, located just east of Vancouver, to create an immersive and co-operative space for Indigenous storytelling in local classrooms.

So those developing the new world — called A Pacific NorthWest Coast Experience — enlisted help from Microsoft, which owns Minecraft, to add the iconic species.

While Minecraft is normally a world of almost limitless possibilities to collect resources for world-building, the kʷikʷəƛəm version sets unique limits — for instance how many salmon players can harvest.

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