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A Kid's Guide to Minecraft:Helping Parents Understand Why Kids Love It

By Kinley Ault, daughter of Publisher Kara Ault, Macaroni Kid Rogers-Bentonville January 16, 2022

Does your kid ever ask you to play Minecraft with them and you just don't understand? My mom, the publisher of Northwest Arkansas Macaroni Kid websites, is one of those parents. In today's article, I will be explaining the main goal and why kids like this game so much.

Minecraft is a very educational game. But it's not just about math, literacy, science, and history like we are taught in school. The game teaches you life skills and cool fun facts that you wouldn't just learn from class. There are two main modes that can be played in Minecraft. The first one I will be explaining is survival mode. In survival mode your child must chop down wood, grow trees and farms. They need to build a shelter to survive and thrive on the main world. The Minecraft world is infinite, so they can always find new places and biomes to explore such as jungles, oceans, and more. There are many things in Minecraft that prevent them from surviving, such as hunger, monsters like creepers, zombies, and other mobs. They can also die by fall damage which means them falling from a tall enough height is that it will make their character take damage and most likely kill their character. A mob refers to any creature or animal in the Minecraft game.There are also peaceful mobs such as pigs, cows, and sheep. As they become able to survive on the mainland, AKA Earth, they can move on to the next area called the nether.

The nether area is filled with lava and fire and in this spot there are many useful materials such as eyes of ender which I will explain their uses later on in this article, lava, gold, and more. This area also provides more mobs such as zombie piglins, regular piglins, hoglins, and Zoglins. Then this is where the eyes of ender come in handy. As you return to the mainland you use your eye of ender, which will navigate you to an area called a stronghold where you get to build a portal to travel to the final realm. You use the remaining eyes of ender to fill in the portal and travel to the realm called the end. I know very practical, right? It's the end of the game though so it makes sense. Of course when I say it's the end of the game-- the game lasts forever but if you are doing a speed run which means you are racing to beat the world record time of finishing the game this would be the end-- but after you win you can still continue playing if you would like. Anyway, in the End realm you must slay the Ender Dragon to complete the game. 


Lastly, I will talk about the other game mode called creative mode and the name itself explains exactly what you do In this mode. Creative mode lets your child express their creativity into a world where they can fly and build structures and redstone contraptions. These are some of the reasons you should maybe give this video game a chance and try to play with your child.



By Kinley Ault, age 11