Middle school ‘architects’ meet the real-life Buffalo Bills stadium designers

Lucas Spruch and his friend Noah Ducato, both eighth graders, finished a bridge-design project over the winter. With a bit of free time to explore, they discovered that Minecraft Education software was installed on the computers in the Depew Middle School lab. Lucas asked his teacher, Aaron Nolan, if he could use the software, which allows multiple users to build in the same virtual world.

“Sure, if you are doing something productive,” said Nolan, who had a suggestion: The Buffalo Bills had recently unveiled the first two renderings of the team’s future stadium, which will be built across the road from Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park. Why not use Minecraft to build out your own version of the stadium?

Lucas and Noah got to work. Soon, they were joined by a dozen of their classmates; together, they imagined what the inside of the stadium could look like.

“We started building the field, then the logo, and it spiraled out of control,” Lucas recalled this week.

Back then, Lucas and Noah couldn’t have suspected that their free-time project would evolve into something that would attract the attention of the real-life stadium designers, prompting a visit to their school and giving them and their classmates one of the earliest in-depth looks at the plans for the Bills’ next home.

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