Minecraft is so much more than a video game. It leaves room for you to think creatively, use reasoning and harvest survival skills while bringing your ideas and dreams to life. It truly is a game that fosters creativity and imagination. Minecraft fosters creativity by giving you the power to bring your thoughts into a virtual reality.
Minecraft may be a game of simple design and blocks that looks like we took a step back in technology, but the beauty of this design is the creative process it brings along with it. Essentially the game is about crafting structures and items using blocks, but you also fight mobs and have to find ways to survive. The graphics of this game are the building blocks you design with. All of these concepts leave room for anybody to create their own world and while teaching survival and design in abstract ways.
Some of the main ways that Minecraft teaches creativity through this video game are:
- Allowing you to be your own architect and design your own buildings, structures, bridges, cities and houses.
- Plant your own gardens and trees to your own design
- Interact with mobs, animals and villagers in your own way or perspective
- Explore worlds creating your own path through them. You can walk or move in any direction freely.
- Solve problems with inductive reasoning and creative thinking. Some of these problems are hunger, shelter, fighting mobs, finding resources and creating your own weapons.
- Introduces simple mathematics related to space and geometry in order to build structures.
- It encourages you to always use your imagination as you live, build and survive in the many different worlds and mods within the game. Your imagine that you are your character and allows your attention to be focussed on that.
- Minecraft also helps teach people how to code. This is an abstract skill that computer programmers use. Learning to code allows you to create and design webpages, video games and just about anything computer related. Not everyone can program but people who think creatively can.
- Also, block-play such as legos, building blocks, jenga and other block games have been used for generations to foster creativity and motor skills. Minecraft takes it a step further and put that concept into a video game.
There is no denying that Minecraft has brought a lot of fun, creativity and learning into homes and schools across the world. The idea that simple blocks can create such magnificent structures with a little thought and a whole lot of creativity is amazing. Not only that the idea of creating your own story, surviving, exploring worlds, facing mobs and raising your own animals leaves the sky as the limit when it comes to creativity. Minecraft solved the problem of too many kids on video games by going outside the box and giving our kids a game that encourages creativity and learning.
