DaVinci's NotebookStudent newspaper archive · Ogden, Utah
Out of the Can

Minecraft is a MIND-CRAFT

A student reviewer walks through Minecraft's game modes, redstone, mob drops and flat worlds.

By Jordan Baird, Writer December 11, 2015 School year 2015/16

Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build houses and protect yourself from the monsters of the night. This game is a sandbox-style game with three modes: Survival, which you get ten hearts and unlimited re-spawns; Creative, where you can fly, explore, build anything with unlimited resources; and Adventure, where you have ten lives but no re-spawns.

This game has dozens of blocks with multiple purposes. These blocks are very helpful depending on what you are doing. For example, if you were building a hidden door, you would want redstone. Redstone carries electricity so you use it for a switch, and sticky pistons; these blocks are only a few of the many electronic blocks.

Also the way you can kill creatures and collect stuff from the dead creatures is really nice. If someone were to kill a zombie, for say, you would get one of four things, depending on what it had: a shovel or sword, a potato, a carrot, or rotten flesh.

A skeleton can drop bones, arrows, or rarely a bow. The bow and arrows go hand in hand to make a useful weapon, while the bones can be used to tame dogs.

Now this game doesn’t have a storyline (unless you have the story mode game) so you can do whatever you want. In the menu you can make the world completely flat with no mountains.

These worlds are really useful for redstone creations. The graphics of this game match an 8-bit game of Mario; the world and everything in it is blocks, so there are no round objects at all.

Minecraft is a great game if you are bored and want to let your mind wander while secreting creative juices. It is whatever you make of it.

Archive note, 2026

What researchers found

Minecraft has since become a serious tool in classrooms and labs. A 2022 paper from Purdue University (arXiv:2212.08124) describes a mod that calculates stress and deformation in any structure a player builds and colors the blocks as a heat map; it was used in the Honors sections of two engineering mechanics courses. The redstone circuits mentioned here also became a test for artificial intelligence. A 2026 benchmark called SciCrafter (arXiv:2604.24697) asks AI agents to wire lamps that light up in set patterns, and the frontier models tested all plateaued at about 26% success.

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