Minecraft

This is my 8 year old son's take on why I should continue letting him play Minecraft! I helped him a bit in the language part but all ideas are his .

Why playing Minecraft is great for children!

Minecraft is a videogame which is very popular with children.   In this game  you have to try & get resources to survive .There are three different modes: one is survival and the other is creative and the other mode is hardcore. 

In “survival mode”, you try to survive by collecting resources and if you die you can come back to life but you lose all the stuff that you had like diamond sword, wood, emerald etc. If you keep stuff in chests before you die then you get back your assets when you are alive again.

In "creative mode", you can build stuff like buildings because you have infinite resources. In Minecraft, I have built things like a rollercoaster, camping area, house and mining spot.

"Hardcore mode" is when you shouldn’t keep stuff in chests because you can’t come back to life once you have died. So in hardcore mode, once you die you lose the game.

In Minecraft, you can practically build anything you can imagine. It encourages kids to be creative and also gives them incentives to explore because they have to figure out what steps to take next  by reading Minecraft books or by watching youtube videos.

Minecraft helps you learn about materials like stones such as andesite and cobble stones because you need different type of stones to make roads and paths. It can give you inspiration to write a story like “One day I went to the nether……”.  “Nether” is another dimension in which there are no animals and there is one leader called “wither”  whom you have to defeat.

In Minecraft, I gained a lot of general knowledge like what an iron ore is, what a furnace is and how you smelt iron ore in a furnace. I also learnt about farming tools such as a hoe.

You can also design your own games in Minecraft  and set your own rules .This promotes thinking and planning .

The best part  is that Minecraft has no rules and so this gives children the freedom to do what they like and this helps them to do more independent thinking.