By Michael Stum
Student Help Desk Apprentice
Are you a creative person who likes to play video games? Have you ever sat in school daydreaming about escaping into another dimension where you can create and explore? When you log on for the first time, you will enter a world that is randomly chosen for you. In this world, you build a life and learn to use survival skills. Minecraft allows you to do just that and get better at it.
Minecraft helps people be creative in so many ways. After you have been playing the game for a long time, you eventually get better at building more complex structures. Some of the structures you can build are a house, a mansion, and S.T.A.R. Labs from The Flash. S.T.A.R. Labs are the laboratory that The Flash and his friends use as their hideout. The S.T.A.R. stands for Scientific and Technological Advanced Research. Even though you can create these buildings, the map is already built for you, which makes it easier.
One of my favorite features in Minecraft is building structures and accessories such as furniture and weapons. You can also add mods, which are add ons that make the game more fun. One of my favorite mods is Speedster Heroes, which adds suits and powers from The Flash. You can also add resource packs that change the way things look. For example, the Item Bound resource pack changes the way tools and weapons look after you use the anvil to change the name of whatever you’re using. This changes the device to look like what you named it; for example, if you use the anvil on a sword and name it Excalibur, it changes the sword to look like one. When it is night time, zombies spawn that try to kill you along with some other dangerous creatures. There are also two portals that transport you to different dimensions. One is the Nether Portal which takes you to the Nether, and the other is the End Portal which takes you to The End.
Minecraft helps students learn creative thinking because you have to plan how the space is laid out before you start building. It also helps with problem solving because if you get in a situation and you are having a hard time with something, you can just improvise. It even helps students with not giving up because the game is so long, that you might just want to quit, but yet the game is so fun, you just can’t.
Minecraft is great to download on school laptops because it helps students be creative during and after school. It is good for giving students a break after school because you can go on multiplayer servers and play a bunch of different minigames like Bed Wars on Hypixel, which is my personal favorite. It also helps students with computer programming because if you are stuck in the game, you can put commands in like /gamemode 1. This is a creative mode, so you can skip the entire game if you wanted to just to kill the Ender Dragon.
Do these features and benefits sound good to you? If you ever get bored, maybe you should give Minecraft a try. It might be the perfect game to unleash your creativity!