A Mom's Short Guide to Minecraft

By now, moms, you must have heard “Mojang is a genius!a, “Oh no,
creepers are here!”, and “Oh no, I have to build myself a better shelter
to keep the creepers out!” There is no doubt that the popularity of
Minecraft amongst kids has skyrocketed in last few years. At VisionTech
we have been offering variety of Minecraft camps since 2013.

Minecraft
is a sandbox construction game where you can build anything you can
imagine. It also has scary monsters, like creepers who tend to want to
sneak up behind you and kill you, and worse, destroy what you have spent
hours building. Playing the game involves placing and breaking various
types of blocks, mining for rare minerals and surviving in a
three-dimensional world. The game has an auto-generated map, and
players can walk into different biomes for exploring or mining. In play
you encounter non-violent animals like pigs, chicken and cows that you
can hunt for food and violent creatures like very evil green creepers,
mobs, spiders and skeletons that hurt you. But the good thing is that
these very unlikable characters only appear in night or dark places. As
long as you hole up in a safe shelter at night and light up a few
torches in dark places, you are good to survive the night for an extra
day of happy smelting.

The game can be played in survival,
creative and multiplayer mode. The best way to learn how to play is in
survival mode on “Easy” difficulty, so while you are learning to craft
tools like shovels and pickaxes, you won’t be killed by monsters (as
quickly). You just to have to remember to build a safe shelter or get
into a shelter your kids have built for themselves (honestly, it’s
easier). In creative mode players have access to almost all resources
and can fly freely around the game worlds and do not get hurt. This is
my least favorite mode as I feel all the excitement is lost but you do
get lot of practice building structures and crafting tools.

In
multiplayer mode kids can either set up their own private servers or
play on many servers hosted by third parties. In LAN mode kids play on
locally interconnected computers on the same Wi-Fi network without a
server set up.

On a side note, Minecraft is being used as a
teaching tool to teach history, Java programming and science. Last year
at our summer camps, kids learned to mod ( modify) Minecraft by
changing the Java code of the game. They created new maps, vehicles and
heavily customized their game while learning Java programming. For
history lessons, one teacher even built many historical landmarks for
kids to explore. I have even seen a fully automated farm designed by
someone with switches and logic gates. So moms,play a game of Minecraft
with your kid, and who knows -- they might even design you a truly
automated washing machine that can load, wash, dry and fold all your
clothes to lessen your workload.

VisionTech Technology Summer Camps
www.visiontechcamps.com