Script (This may not be 100% accurate as I changed some things in the moment):
Minecraft. What are your initial thoughts about this? A random video game, a game we all played as kids. At first, it may just seem like a random old video game you’ll get bored of after a few months like every other game. But really, it's not. In my eyes, minecraft was a game with endless possibilities and limitless ideas, since there really is no end.
So, when this project was first introduced to me, I thought of minecraft. However, what aspect of minecraft should I focus on? Well there's nothing more nostalgic than a good old minecraft house.
Building. Building was what stuck to me the most. However, as I continued to brainstorm ideas, I was conflicted. This was a SCHOOL project was it not? Is it really okay to make it about a video game? Now, before covid 19 this wouldn't have even been a choice. It’s way too immature for school. But, going through this time, I realized that I was being too uptight in school. Now, I'm not saying I started to slack off (I did that too but we don't talk about that). I’m simply saying this was when I started to explore my creative side, literally. Get it, because there's a creative mode in minecraft. Yeah. Anyways. I used this project as a way to express my creative side. Sure, I could have done something like learning how to calculate the mass of Pluto or something more “academic” but I am happy with my choice. I have learned many things over the course of quarantine. This project has made me realize one more thing.
How important it is to explore my creative side. Especially in school. School should be about learning. Not only learning basic things like math and history, but learning about yourself and your capabilities. So, if that's why you’re wondering why I chose minecraft, that’s why. Now, onto the actual project. I decided to document my process through houses. In the beginning, I started by building 3 different houses. I did this with not that much knowledge about how and what to build yet, so i kinda just winged it. Here are the houses
Personally i like the bottom house. As you can see, these are kind of beginner builds, obviously. So I took this and looked at what I could expand and improve on. First, I decided to work on different roofs, as those are a big part of what the build will look like in the end.
This is a good point to notice the different resources I used during this process. For example, during the creation of my roofs blog, I was able to use a diagram that helped me understand the different types and styles of roofs. With this knowledge, I was able to make a better house than the beginning ones.
Personally, I liked it at the time. But now that I'm looking at it again, I realize how boring it was. No offense to past Rachel but what was she thinking? And that was what this process was about. Improving. Learning. So, it was time to learn landscaping and interior design. After researching and testing different styles, I was able to revamp this house into something a little more… me.
This was a lot better. But I still felt held back by some constraints. I needed to branch out more. How better can I do this by going to places with different trees! Get it, because I said BRANCH out. Yeah. Anyway, I decided to go to new biomes to test out my building skills. And here they are.
By doing that, I was able to work on different styles of builds and adapt to my surroundings. Now, you’re probably wondering something.
What did I learn? What could I possibly learn from a boring old game. Well, maybe it’s not the most impactful thing. It's not life changing like learning how to become the president or something like that. It’s minecraft. I learned how to express myself and how I can always improve on something.
At the start, I thought my builds were good, but after forcing myself to work on certain things, I improved significantly. Now, I won't lie. Even though this is just a game, I still had some trouble while going through the process. Procrastination was the biggest struggle.
As with most of the people in school, I ended up procrastinating a lot of the days and ended up playing minecraft at midnight just to work on the houses. I needed to change this, so I worked on minecraft during office hours, but it was hard to just leave it till later. In conclusion, I would say that this project was a success on my end.
Not only did I get better at building, I worked on fixing my procrastination, and realized that there was more to school than just the strict basics, there's creativity.
It is so impressive that you used this project to turn a simple video game into a professional skill! I am so glad you found fun and enjoyment in your project, and I loved all of your builds throughout these weeks. Lovely job!
Great Ted Talk!!!! The part where you talked about the "unimportant-ness" of Minecraft and then went into the details that make it more was great, as well as your builds!! A suggestion would maybe be to appeal more to the audience with your message (like basically make it like a 'book theme') but this is only a possible suggestion!!! I absolutely loved your presentation :)
I liked your overall point about creativity because it fit really well with the general mechanics of minecraft and how the game is played. Also, you explained your learning process really clearly and condensed the information well. One suggestion I have is to expand a little further beyond simply "creativity" because it is a relatively general term.
Like last week, this week was a little bit more boring than past weeks. This week I decided to focus on redstone, which is basically electricity in minecraft. So, I tried to incorporate it into buildings. When doing my research, I found a nice door mechanic I wanted to apply to a building of some sort. And what better building than a hobbit hole! Ahahah just kidding it's just an underground base built into a hill. The automatic door I built was not too complicated and I found it a nice way to add a little bit of extraness to the building. Here it is: As you can see, this was going to be the main entrance to the structure. I really enjoyed experimenting with the redstone, even if I didn't know how to use half of the stuff oops. Since I was building underground (this was actually my first underground base of the project) I accidently stumbled upon a cave. Within those caves were a few monsters. One of them actually came into the house! I was so estatic about this as I could now ...
Although I have improved on my exterior building skills, I haven't focused on what is in the houses. So, I worked on my interior design! While browsing the explore page of Instagram, I stumbled into a Minecraft thread that could be useful for improving on building. So, I tried to recreate them in my own world. As you can see, I was able to recreate all of them with near perfect accuracy, so this was not a problem for me. However, I did run into a different problem. Last week I mentioned how I was having difficulty getting my timelapse mod to work. So, I was troubleshooting it this week and was able to get it working. But, as the timelapse was processing, it said 24 hours till completion and then crashed. So unfortunately, I do not have a timelapse for this week. I did see a different way to timelapse in Minecraft so I'll try that way this week. Now, moving on to the house I have been working on. Here is the dining area I constructed. I was able to use a variety of blocks for...
This week, I worked on applying my learnings to build more houses! Similar to the first ever blog I did, I have constructed three new houses of different varieties. I did have some difficulty when building one of the houses though. It seemed to have a spider infection! P.S. this is satire. I still was not able to aquire a timelapse software, unfortunately, but I have recorded a tour of one of the houses. The tour I recorded was my personal favorite so that will be at the end because you gotta save the best for last. So, now onto the houses! For each house, I built it in a different biome in order to see how I can adapt my building techniques to the environment. The first one I built was on the beach and is kind of in a greek style. Here is the house from a further view. As you can see, the blueprint of this house was very open, not having proper windows/doors, since it is a beachhouse. Even though I really like this house, I feel like the other two are just a little more complex and ...
It is so impressive that you used this project to turn a simple video game into a professional skill! I am so glad you found fun and enjoyment in your project, and I loved all of your builds throughout these weeks. Lovely job!
ReplyDeleteGreat Ted Talk!!!! The part where you talked about the "unimportant-ness" of Minecraft and then went into the details that make it more was great, as well as your builds!! A suggestion would maybe be to appeal more to the audience with your message (like basically make it like a 'book theme') but this is only a possible suggestion!!! I absolutely loved your presentation :)
ReplyDeleteI liked your overall point about creativity because it fit really well with the general mechanics of minecraft and how the game is played. Also, you explained your learning process really clearly and condensed the information well. One suggestion I have is to expand a little further beyond simply "creativity" because it is a relatively general term.
ReplyDelete