About a month ago I introduced the children to the program Minecraft. I have known about it for about 2 years now, and whilst I recognised the learning potential of the game, I felt that by introducing it I would be opening the floodgates to nothing but Minecraft for the foreseeable future, with its infinite possibilities in a virtual world, I feared the infinite possibilities in the real world may be left behind. After a lot of thought and reading on the subject, we decided the time was right to introduce it. The first 3 days were completely dedicated to it, and Autumn found it quite tough having her playmate extracted from her play so suddenly and completely. I helped her to find things to do on her own, but didn't like the idea of life adjusting and changing so utterly and completely.
We had a chat and I suggested that some sort of limit were introduced so that we could all continue to function as a family in the normal way. My first suggest was playing it before breakfast. This went down like a lead balloon and was followed by a moody teenager going round the house slamming doors and huffing and puffing a lot. So I suggested that Evan come up with another idea that could help him to have Minecraft time and still allow us to do the things we normally do as well. He suggested before breakfast and after dinner, unless something else needed doing. I felt that this was a reasonable idea, and so did everyone else, so that is what we agreed upon.
So enough of the practicalities of finding a time and space for it to work with our family, now to the creations.
I haven't paid very close attention to all of Evan's projects, but here are some of the things that I believe he has worked on and created.
Digging to the centre of the world and finding lava;
a lot more digging really deep;
making a home with pretty garden features, a pond and water features;
a roller coaster;
using someone elses realm to make new spaces including a heated waterflume and heated swimming pool, more rollercoasters;
a penguin slide;
building pyramids to place beacons on;
In an octonauts land: an Octopod, an Octolab, several Gups and Octobots.
There are many other things that I don't know about as well. Skills he has developed include:
Making signs, building floating structures, teleporting, discovering new ways of doing things, following maps, programming using Redstone, exploring the properties of minecraft materials,
He has also thoroughly enjoyed talking through his projects with people. He is keen for his friends to start using Minecraft and to share his realms with the wider online Minecraft community.
Meanwhile Autumn has begun to use it too, exploring and building towers in the Frozen Minecraft
world that has been downloaded for her.
We had a chat and I suggested that some sort of limit were introduced so that we could all continue to function as a family in the normal way. My first suggest was playing it before breakfast. This went down like a lead balloon and was followed by a moody teenager going round the house slamming doors and huffing and puffing a lot. So I suggested that Evan come up with another idea that could help him to have Minecraft time and still allow us to do the things we normally do as well. He suggested before breakfast and after dinner, unless something else needed doing. I felt that this was a reasonable idea, and so did everyone else, so that is what we agreed upon.
So enough of the practicalities of finding a time and space for it to work with our family, now to the creations.
I haven't paid very close attention to all of Evan's projects, but here are some of the things that I believe he has worked on and created.
Digging to the centre of the world and finding lava;
a lot more digging really deep;
making a home with pretty garden features, a pond and water features;
a roller coaster;
using someone elses realm to make new spaces including a heated waterflume and heated swimming pool, more rollercoasters;
a penguin slide;
building pyramids to place beacons on;
In an octonauts land: an Octopod, an Octolab, several Gups and Octobots.
There are many other things that I don't know about as well. Skills he has developed include:
Making signs, building floating structures, teleporting, discovering new ways of doing things, following maps, programming using Redstone, exploring the properties of minecraft materials,
He has also thoroughly enjoyed talking through his projects with people. He is keen for his friends to start using Minecraft and to share his realms with the wider online Minecraft community.
Meanwhile Autumn has begun to use it too, exploring and building towers in the Frozen Minecraft
world that has been downloaded for her.
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