‘Minecraft’ helps get students to Quebec

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This article was published 23/02/2015 (3975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s an immensely popular and addicting video game — and some parents don’t seem to mind watching their kids log countless hours playing it.

Many in the world of academia have heralded “Minecraft” as an educational injection into the world of modern video games, long plagued with a stigma of being nothing more than violent brain-melters.

A group of parents decided to harness the immense popularity of the video game to bolster fundraising efforts outside of the usual bake sales.

Between 25 and 30 kids from Grade 2 to Grade 8 packed into the East End Community Centre on Saturday for the ticketed event called Punching Trees, from which the proceeds went to funding an annual trip to Quebec for Grade 8 French-immersion students from École Harrison and École New Era schools.

“We know how crazy ‘Minecraft’ is right now,” said Melissa Turner, one of the parent organizers — though she, like many other parents, don’t fully understand it.

“We all said we’re so sick of selling things,” and her son had just finished a stint at a Minecraft camp at Brandon University, which is where the idea came from.

“I can’t follow it. I swear, I know nothing. All I know is it’s on my computer.”

For those not familiar with the game, it has been often called the Lego of the virtual world. The infinite 3-D space is made up of blocks representing resources for players to create nearly anything. Users in the universe start with nothing — so are forced to punch trees to get wood used to build tools.

From there, the cycle continues and the possibilities are seemingly endless.

More than 18.6 million PC and Mac users have purchased the game, according to the developer, which was purchased by Microsoft late last year — and that doesn’t include the hundreds of millions sold for the Xbox, PlayStation and mobile versions.

Andy Chambers was one of the administrators at Saturday’s event.

He described what it was about the game that has drawn him in for three years now.

“Where do I start?” he said. “You can do almost anything in this game.”

He went on to detail how he built an in-game teleporter like Dr. Who’s tardis, which took him just “a few minutes.”

Oh, also, he’s 11.

The 11-year-old may not have the vocabulary, but what he described was an understanding of co-ordinates in 3-D spaces.

“What he’s describing is … principles of technical engineering,” said Andy’s father James, a developer who built his first computer game when he was seven. “He’s talking about a form of programming.

“Kids are just going to understand 3-D the way we just never did … It’s really cool to see where it’s going to go.”

James volunteers a few times a year at École Harrison School to teach kids the basic languages of the Internet — HTML, CSS and Javascript — and is a firm believer of the get-them-while-they’re-young mentality of computer programing.

“They’re going to understand things we’ve never even seen.”

Like his late grandma’s frustration with the blinking VCR clock, James is just waiting for his children’s understanding of technology to surpass his own.

“The VCR was too much. She was born in 1912. She didn’t get it,” he said. “I’m waiting for my VCR moment.”

The amount of time we all spend in front of screens is only going to increase. James sees it as an immense learning opportunity for children, but “there has to be a balance between creation and consumption.”

“I always tell my kids, they can be on the computer as long as they want to, but if they’re playing a game, it better be one that they write.

“If you want to sit on the Xbox for 45 minutes, you have to program for an hour first.”

The parent group will hold another two of the “Minecraft” events on March 20 and April 18 before the Quebec trip in June.

Tickets are available at minecraftexperience.

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» gbruce@brandonsun.com

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