Analogous to Lego in the modern, online world, Minecraft blends play with cognitive challenge by developing the sorts of transferable skills that are becoming more in-demand for both higher education and the workplace.
While limiting screen time has its virtues for a number of reasons, parents would do well to understand the surprising things your child can learn from Minecraft in terms of their personal, creative, and academic development.
From providing an outlet for to-be visual or game designers to offering an environment to learn the basics of logic in programming, this easy-to-learn and irrefutably popular platform has more than a few things that both you and your child can grow to love.
Creativity and Visual Design
From designing gameplay characters with Minecraft skins to engineering entire worlds, your child can imagine, design, and deploy their visual creations in the Minecraft universe. Your child can choose an existing look for their character with a Minecraft skins download, or create and upload their own custom outfit through a change to the source code by creating a Minecraft skins mod (short for ‘modification’).
Once created, your child’s design can be showcased among thousands of other unblocked Minecraft skins on various sites online, a veritable show-and-tell with global proportions.
This level of control, customization, and creative freedom applies to more than individual characters in the game – it extends to terrain, structures, and even machines with a functional purpose. Through mods and open-source collaboration, your child is learning the basic workflow of a front-end developer at a tech company, customizing existing visual designs and deploying them to the world at large.
Problem Solving and Basic Programming
Through Minecraft’s Redstone blocks, your child can learn the basic logic that defines any programming language in use today. Using IF, ELSE, THEN and END commands, coding in Minecraft teaches your child programmatic thinking, if not the exact syntax of languages like Python or JavaScript. Through trial and error using a child-friendly interface, blocks of code can be rearranged to understand their function intuitively – thus paving the way for more advanced coding experience later in life.
The genius of Minecraft is that children are intrinsically motivated to learn programming since their codes, i.e. mods, have a direct effect on how they are able to enjoy the game. Minecraft mods allow your child to customize almost anything in the game, from lighting and movement speed to advanced technology and special super powers. Roblox and Scratch offer similar functionality, but arguably Minecraft trumps all due to its sheer size and level of global popularity.
Teamwork and Project Management
An awe-inspiring example of co-creation on the Minecraft platform is Westeroscraft, a community-based collective project that attempts to recreate George RR Martin’s fantasy continent of Westeros using Minecraft’s native building blocks (and no small amount of mods). Beyond being a project, Westeroscraft and other worlds like it are comprised of an online community.
Through participation in their growth and development, your child will learn networking skills, personal initiative, delegation, and collaboration within a functional group – all great fodder for a college essay or job application!
Having grown from its humble origins as a ‘sandbox’ video game to a truly global phenomenon and one of the most influential games of all time, the list of surprising things your child can learn from Minecraft is sure to keep growing.
While grasping the full capabilities of Minecraft as a tool isn’t always easy for parents (just mastering the lingo can be a challenge in and of itself), understanding the fundamental concepts and areas of practice the game encourages can be eye-opening for those wishing to see their child succeed later in life.
