Jeffrey Pedersen

Pedersen’s innovative teaching idea, “History Puzzle Rooms,” focuses on developing critical thinking and collaboration skills for the students at Blacksburg High School. Throughout the school year, students involved in the project will work to design their own content-themed “Puzzle Rooms” and take on various leadership roles as they create a narrative and theme for each room, design key “plot points” and create physical or digital clues. The Voya grant will go towards providing the necessary resources for the project’s creation to put students in the role of developers, challenging them to innovate and leverage their knowledge and project skills. Pedersen hopes that History Puzzle Rooms will provide a significant shift towards skills-based learning, which is transferable to many other settings.