Are you ready for Roblox? You, as in the parent of a child who has probably been bugging you to sign them up for a Roblox account. As the parent of a child eager to design, build, and play games. As a parent who worries about keeping your child safe online.

5 Tech Parenting Superpowers

Raising healthy, engaged, creative kids in today’s connected world demands real tech parenting superpowers. Beyond being a digital hero with routines in place to manage family screen time, parents also act as curators, crossing guards, and creative problem solvers — choosing products, attending to their kids’ online safety, and helping their kids make the most of their time online.

You can find helpful guides to Roblox from trusted sources like Common Sense Media or watch how-to videos to help your child get started. Alternately, I’ve written this post to explain tech parenting superpowers you’ll need to help your family get the most out of the game.

By the end of this post you’ll have gained 5 tech parenting superpowers. You’ll be able to:

• Explain what Roblox is to other parents in a straightforward way.
• Know how to use Roblox’s tools and settings to maximize your child’s online safety.
• Understand why kids watch Roblox on YouTube.
• Know how Roblox’s scripting language gives kids practice in text-based coding.
• Understand how Robux work and what to watch out for.

Here’s how to:

1. Explain Roblox To Other Parents

Explaining Roblox to other parents can be easy if you stick to these three points:

• Roblox is not a game, per se. It is a massively multiplayer online game creation platform where kids can play games created by other Roblox users or create games of their own using a free, all-in-one building tool called Roblox Studio.
• The platform and the games created by players are multiplayer; this means players are in a virtual world space with lots of other players. Roblox includes many settings to manage how players interact, including chat filters and online moderators.
• All content in Roblox is created by users. This means that all varieties of creativity are on display, including some content that may be inappropriate for your child.

2. Maximize Your Child’s Online Safety

Google Roblox and a lot of what you’ll read relates to parental concerns about safety. Some posts warn parents off the platform entirely, while others take a more measured approach, urging parents to take advantage of Roblox’s parental controls, while also empowering kids to protect themselves. Learning how navigate Roblox’s parental controls and privacy settings offers a hands-on way to develop your online safety superpowers. You’ll not only learn a lot about how Roblox works, but will also gains skills you can pass along to your kids to help them develop good digital habits!

Roblox and Player Safety

Here’s what you need to know how Roblox manages player safety:

• Chat filters. Roblox uses filters to weed out bad words and other problematic language. This prevents inappropriate content and personally identifiable information from being visible on the site. Parents can disable or limit online chat, controlling which users your child can chat with. No chat means chat is disabled. Chat with friends limits chat to a list of users you approve. Without restrictions, users can chat with anyone on the site. Players under the age of 13 see and can say fewer words and phrases than players over the age of 13. Parents can add a PIN to their account which locks the account settings, keeping kids who might not be happy with the restrictions on their chat from resetting them. Click here to learn more about how to customize chat settings for your child.
• Human moderators. All user-uploaded images are reviewed by human moderators for inappropriate content before being posted. Moderators assist in proactively removing inappropriate content from chat.
• Curated lists. Parents can limit which games are available for play by their child through a curated list. This is done my enabling Account Restrictions in their account settings. Curating lists in collaboration with your child are a great way to learn more about your child’s interests, while also helping them to making choices that are age-appropriate.
• Reporting and blocking: Kid-friendly online communities are guided by a set of community rules linked to ways of dealing with violations of community norms. Roblox’s community rulesoutline expectations around player behavior, and actively encourage players to report inappropriate behavior. Learn how to report bad behavior and block users and make sure your child knows how to do it, too.

Managing In-game Communication

In addition to understanding the tools available inside of Roblox, its important to be on the alert and communicate with your child about their play. Common Sense Media recommends that you should coach your child not chat with people they don’t know (unless they can verify they’re actually a friend, or a friend of a friend, in real life) and to not accept private messages (PMs) from anyone they don’t know. They also recommend making sure “your child knows never to give away personal information, trust their instincts if someone makes them uncomfortable, and never move a conversation to a different platform (a telltale predator red flag).”

3. Demystify Why Kids Watch So Much Roblox On YouTube

I’ve written about why kids watch so many Minecraft videos, and the same holds true for Roblox. Watching Roblox videos can help kids stay in the loop of their social circle. Kids without a Roblox account can learn the lingo and connect to popular personalities of Roblox in ways that allow them to remain part of a fandom they share with their friends. In addition, How-To videos help kids learn how to use Roblox Studio and hone their game design skills by learning from experts.

4. Understand What Roblox Offers Kids Who Want to Learn to Code

Making games in Roblox is pretty straightforward. The platform comes with many ready-made templates that give beginners a place to start. But if your child wants to make a unique game, they’ll need to learn how to use Roblox’s scripting language, called Roblox Lua. Players use a drag-and-drop code editor to create custom actions, conditions, or game mechanics. In doing so they are exposed to programming concepts like loops, conditionals, arrays, and inheritance.

Roblox has a helpful player community and many resources, including a wiki, to help players learn Roblox scripting. I’ve found AlvinBlox to be one of the best. Like Legos or Minecraft, what kids can make is limited only by their imagination.

If you have a child that learns best in more structured environments, there are a number of organizations offering courses and camps in learning to code with Roblox. They include iD Tech, CodaKids, and Code Ninjas.

5. Be Aware of Robux and What to Watch Out For

Roblox uses an in-game currency called Robux. The currency is used for various in-game purchases, like outfits or animations, weapons or other tools, or unique abilities in games. There are a lot of different ways of getting Robux. The simplest (unfortunately) is to buy them straight out or get them as part of a paid subscription. Players can also trade for them with other players or even have someone donate them to you.

If this sounds confusing, it can be. Players who create games or digital items in Roblox can earn real money from their creations. They do so by charging people to play their games on the platform using Roblox, the game’s virtual currency, or by offering pay-as-you-go in-game purchases. This makes Robux pretty appealing to kids. In-app purchases are not a new model, but it is one parents need to understand is at play in Roblox.

You also need to know that Roblox uses a freemium/premium mode. The basic experience is free — players can play loads of games and download Roblox Studio. But if your child wants to explore all the platform has to offer, they’ll they’ll want to become a member of the Builders Club, which comes with additional features and a membership fee.

Digital Socializing

As a parent and advocate for the positive potential of gaming, I see the opportunity in platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. They can help kids (and parents) learn about the risks and benefits of playing with others online. Roblox games are multiplayer games. They are social. For many kids, playing on a Minecraft server or joining the Roblox community might be their first experience socializing with others online. Take advantage of the experience as a chance to level up your tech parenting superpowers and explore all Roblox has to offer.

A final detail: Roblox is available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Devices, and Xbox One.

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Let Your Kid Play Roblox And Gain These 5 Tech Parenting Superpowers was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

5 Tech Parenting Superpowers

Raising healthy, engaged, creative kids in today’s connected world demands real tech parenting superpowers. Beyond being a digital hero with routines in place to manage family screen time, parents also act as curators, crossing guards, and creative problem solvers — choosing products, attending to their kids’ online safety, and helping their kids make the most of their time online.

You can find helpful guides to Roblox from trusted sources like Common Sense Media or watch how-to videos to help your child get started. Alternately, I’ve written this post to explain tech parenting superpowers you’ll need to help your family get the most out of the game.

By the end of this post you’ll have gained 5 tech parenting superpowers. You’ll be able to:

• Explain what Roblox is to other parents in a straightforward way.
• Know how to use Roblox’s tools and settings to maximize your child’s online safety.
• Understand why kids watch Roblox on YouTube.
• Know how Roblox’s scripting language gives kids practice in text-based coding.
• Understand how Robux work and what to watch out for.

Here’s how to:

1. Explain Roblox To Other Parents

Explaining Roblox to other parents can be easy if you stick to these three points:

• Roblox is not a game, per se. It is a massively multiplayer online game creation platform where kids can play games created by other Roblox users or create games of their own using a free, all-in-one building tool called Roblox Studio.
• The platform and the games created by players are multiplayer; this means players are in a virtual world space with lots of other players. Roblox includes many settings to manage how players interact, including chat filters and online moderators.
• All content in Roblox is created by users. This means that all varieties of creativity are on display, including some content that may be inappropriate for your child.

2. Maximize Your Child’s Online Safety

Google Roblox and a lot of what you’ll read relates to parental concerns about safety. Some posts warn parents off the platform entirely, while others take a more measured approach, urging parents to take advantage of Roblox’s parental controls, while also empowering kids to protect themselves. Learning how navigate Roblox’s parental controls and privacy settings offers a hands-on way to develop your online safety superpowers. You’ll not only learn a lot about how Roblox works, but will also gains skills you can pass along to your kids to help them develop good digital habits!

Roblox and Player Safety

Here’s what you need to know how Roblox manages player safety:

• Chat filters. Roblox uses filters to weed out bad words and other problematic language. This prevents inappropriate content and personally identifiable information from being visible on the site. Parents can disable or limit online chat, controlling which users your child can chat with. No chat means chat is disabled. Chat with friends limits chat to a list of users you approve. Without restrictions, users can chat with anyone on the site. Players under the age of 13 see and can say fewer words and phrases than players over the age of 13. Parents can add a PIN to their account which locks the account settings, keeping kids who might not be happy with the restrictions on their chat from resetting them. Click here to learn more about how to customize chat settings for your child.
• Human moderators. All user-uploaded images are reviewed by human moderators for inappropriate content before being posted. Moderators assist in proactively removing inappropriate content from chat.
• Curated lists. Parents can limit which games are available for play by their child through a curated list. This is done my enabling Account Restrictions in their account settings. Curating lists in collaboration with your child are a great way to learn more about your child’s interests, while also helping them to making choices that are age-appropriate.
• Reporting and blocking: Kid-friendly online communities are guided by a set of community rules linked to ways of dealing with violations of community norms. Roblox’s community rulesoutline expectations around player behavior, and actively encourage players to report inappropriate behavior. Learn how to report bad behavior and block users and make sure your child knows how to do it, too.

Managing In-game Communication

In addition to understanding the tools available inside of Roblox, its important to be on the alert and communicate with your child about their play. Common Sense Media recommends that you should coach your child not chat with people they don’t know (unless they can verify they’re actually a friend, or a friend of a friend, in real life) and to not accept private messages (PMs) from anyone they don’t know. They also recommend making sure “your child knows never to give away personal information, trust their instincts if someone makes them uncomfortable, and never move a conversation to a different platform (a telltale predator red flag).”

3. Demystify Why Kids Watch So Much Roblox On YouTube

I’ve written about why kids watch so many Minecraft videos, and the same holds true for Roblox. Watching Roblox videos can help kids stay in the loop of their social circle. Kids without a Roblox account can learn the lingo and connect to popular personalities of Roblox in ways that allow them to remain part of a fandom they share with their friends. In addition, How-To videos help kids learn how to use Roblox Studio and hone their game design skills by learning from experts.

4. Understand What Roblox Offers Kids Who Want to Learn to Code

Making games in Roblox is pretty straightforward. The platform comes with many ready-made templates that give beginners a place to start. But if your child wants to make a unique game, they’ll need to learn how to use Roblox’s scripting language, called Roblox Lua. Players use a drag-and-drop code editor to create custom actions, conditions, or game mechanics. In doing so they are exposed to programming concepts like loops, conditionals, arrays, and inheritance.

Roblox has a helpful player community and many resources, including a wiki, to help players learn Roblox scripting. I’ve found AlvinBlox to be one of the best. Like Legos or Minecraft, what kids can make is limited only by their imagination.

If you have a child that learns best in more structured environments, there are a number of organizations offering courses and camps in learning to code with Roblox. They include iD Tech, CodaKids, and Code Ninjas.

5. Be Aware of Robux and What to Watch Out For

Roblox uses an in-game currency called Robux. The currency is used for various in-game purchases, like outfits or animations, weapons or other tools, or unique abilities in games. There are a lot of different ways of getting Robux. The simplest (unfortunately) is to buy them straight out or get them as part of a paid subscription. Players can also trade for them with other players or even have someone donate them to you.

If this sounds confusing, it can be. Players who create games or digital items in Roblox can earn real money from their creations. They do so by charging people to play their games on the platform using Roblox, the game’s virtual currency, or by offering pay-as-you-go in-game purchases. This makes Robux pretty appealing to kids. In-app purchases are not a new model, but it is one parents need to understand is at play in Roblox.

You also need to know that Roblox uses a freemium/premium mode. The basic experience is free — players can play loads of games and download Roblox Studio. But if your child wants to explore all the platform has to offer, they’ll they’ll want to become a member of the Builders Club, which comes with additional features and a membership fee.

Digital Socializing

As a parent and advocate for the positive potential of gaming, I see the opportunity in platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. They can help kids (and parents) learn about the risks and benefits of playing with others online. Roblox games are multiplayer games. They are social. For many kids, playing on a Minecraft server or joining the Roblox community might be their first experience socializing with others online. Take advantage of the experience as a chance to level up your tech parenting superpowers and explore all Roblox has to offer.

A final detail: Roblox is available on PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Devices, and Xbox One.

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons

My kids are only toddlers but I recognize how critical it will be for me to teach them how to handle conflict more effectively. According to a number of studies, learning how to resolve conflict, either between siblings or peers helps kids cope with other kinds of stress. It makes them better adjusted and more resilient as teenagers — and more successful as adults. But research also shows most kids don’t know how to settle disputes constructively. One exhaustive study showed the following: left to their own devices, 90% of conflicts between elementary school children go unresolved or end destructively. Most kids shun conflict or try to crush their opposition; more than 60% rely on adults to resolve their conflicts.

Research shows kids experience conflict once every three minutes. Given how prevalent conflict is among kids playing with others, what might this research mean for online gaming? Players report that antisocial behavior is the least favorite aspect of online play, and can have lasting effects. For example, data suggests that League of Legends players who experience bad in-game behavior are up to 320% more likely to quit playing the game.

I’ve written about some of the life skills that parents can nurture through Minecraft, including teamwork, strategic communication, and recovery from failure. I’ve also shared research on some of the prosocial benefits of playing games with others. Is there a role for a game like Minecraft to play in teaching kids to resolve conflict productively? Can a game like Minecraft help us raise a generation of “good” gamers?

Crafting Conflict

Minecraft, like all games, incorporates conflict as a key element of game play. In multiplayer survival mode players must compete over resources and learn how to work together. Even in creative mode, players experience conflict as they work within the constraints of the world. The game allows some things (upside down mobs) and disallows others (blocks cannot be broken by swords). When Minecraft is played on a multiplayer server, social conflict is inevitable. This is especially true when kids are trying to work together. Conflict is both a present and necessary aspect of cooperative efforts: players may agree on the goals, but be in conflict over how to reach them. Further, when kids are new to a server, they can get themselves into trouble by inadvertently taking another player’s items or by accidentally destroying someone else’s build.

Moderating Minecraft

Two years ago Connected Camps, in collaboration with researcher Petr Slovak and Committee for Children, began to explore how kids were resolving conflict on our servers. We had many safeguards in place to ensure that the server was kid-friendly. But we wondered if there was more we could do to help kids level up their social and communication skills.

After months of research we found that there were several things we could do to better support socio-emotional learning (SEL) in our programs. One change we made was in the way our online counselors moderated our Minecraft server. Rather than swooping in and solving problems that arose between players, counselors instead were trained to turn ownership of the resolution over to the kids. This encouraged players to see each other’s perspectives and generate their own solutions.

Counselors were taught ways of guiding this problem-solving process. For example, if a child’s proposed solution seems clearly inappropriate (‘I will hit him back’), rather than rejecting such a solution from a position of power, the counselor would either probe for an alternative solution (‘that is one option, what else could you do?’), guide the child to think through the consequences (‘how do you think he will react then?’), or ask the other child whether that would resolve the situation successfully from his/her perspective (‘would this solve the problem?’). This shift from a more authoritarian role to one of mediator or coach has been empowering for both kids and counselors. It enables all involved to spend their energy and time on developing possible solutions rather than fighting over ‘what happened’.

Peril or Potential

The underlying philosophy of this approach is that conflicts are a normal and inevitable part of daily life that cannot be eliminated. It is rather how conflicts are managed — not their presence as such — that determines if they are destructive or constructive. Learning to see conflict as an opportunity to be creative in its resolution leads kids to feel more optimistic and confident when conflict does arise. Rather than walking away from a problem they engage in ways that not only resolve the conflict but strengthen social bonds.

If we want to support kids in having lots of positive relationships in their lives, we have to acknowledge that it is crucial for children to have experiences of conflict. These experiences should take place in safe spaces where escalation does not lead to serious outcomes (e.g., physical violence), and where support is available for kids to try out constructive rather than destructive conflict resolution methods.

Preparing Kids for a Healthy Future

Kids live and breathe conflict. Helping them to develop productive ways of resolving conflict, including an ability to problem solve and actively listen, feel and show empathy for others, and create and maintain positive relationships can have powerful effects. Skills like self-esteem, self-efficacy, and sociability have been shown to matter across cultures. Children who develop these skills are more likely to graduate high school, and are better prepared to pursue college degrees and to become engaged citizens. Helping children to develop social and emotional skills is one of the most important things we can do to prepare them for a happy and healthy future.

We are continuing to explore SEL-rich moderation techniques at Connected Camps and feel energized by the feedback we are getting from our counselors and families about the benefits of the change in approach. While my kids are a few years away from joining the Connected Camps community, I am eager to take the lessons I am learning in doing this work and apply them at home!

**Thanks to Petr Slovak for his contribution to this project

Can Minecraft Help Raise A Generation of Good Gamers? was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Competitive gaming, or esports, is considered by many to be the next big thing. With a global viewership of 292 million people in 2016 and global revenues of over $463 million the sport looks set to dominate the hearts and minds of many. But can the sport do more than entertain the gaming masses? Can it also be leveraged as a platform for youth engagement and mentorship around STEM interests and social emotional learning?

Connected Camps recently partnered with the Samueli Foundation, researchers at UCI, and others to help launch the Orange County Esports League. The goal: allow high school students to pursue an interest in gaming and enhance their skills in leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, and communication. Organizers of the league chose League of Legends, a fast-paced game that pits two teams of powerful champions against one another across multiple battlefields and game modes, for play during the inaugural season.

From Counselor to Coach

Given the highly social nature of esports — players compete in teams, stream their play online for millions, and interact with their fans online and in person — the league was a natural extension of the Connected Camps approach. In our afterschool labs and summer camps kids work with online counselors who do many of the same things as a coach: support kids in leveling up their technical expertise in a topic they are passionate about while helping them navigate the social and emotional challenges of learning online with others. This type of informal mentorship can be transformative for kids, making them more resilient and better able to navigate college, career, and life.

The league launched in January 2018. Schools from all over Orange County fielded teams made up of students of every experience level, from novice to expert. We recruited and hired a group of League of Legend coaches who work with the teams online during the season, in afterschool practices, and during online clinics run in the evenings. Coaches come from universities around the country and hold academic interests in disciplines like mathematics, economics, computer science, and biology. All shared a deep passion for the game, experience working with youth, and credentials as top players of the game.

While their coaching work has much in common with traditional sports, there is one distinct difference. As Nickolas Landry, coaching lead for Connected Camps notes, “League of Legends is somewhat different from traditional sports because in order to become a coach, you have be a high ranking player. You essentially have to be a part of the 1% of the player base that manages to reach the rank of ‘Diamond’ or above, year after year. High Ranks often seem unattainable to players in Lower Ranks, but coaches are the living proof that any rank you want is attainable and that the road of self-improvement is never ending.”

Getting better at anything can be challenging, even when it is something you care about. Practice helps, but without support, encouragement, training, and challenge, practice alone is not enough. Coaches work closely with educators at each participating school to create an environment that values camaraderie, sportsmanship, and learning.

Takeaways

Research on video games indicates that under the right conditions, their play can be incredibly beneficial. Studies have shown video game play can improve visual acuity and attention, foster scientific reasoning, accelerate language learning, and increase problem-solving skills. Playing games with others can also lead to prosocial benefits, including improved communication, conflict resolution, and collaboration skills. An informal conversation with some of our coaches offered similar insights.

When asked about what he’s learned from coaching in the league this season, Ryan Lucich, a mathematics major and member of Texas Tech’s esports team, said “I think the best skill I have taken from this job would be professional communications. This ranges from working with the general managers who are teachers at the school, working with the players, and working with other coaches. It requires a lot of communication, which has always been a weakness for me and I didn’t have much experience with before. Another thing I have learned has been how to handle various situations within a team environment. Dealing with a disagreement between players or toxic situations is much different in a coaching role than a players role. I feel a lot more confident in my ability to handle those situations now more than when I first started coaching.”

Jake Carr, a coach with a background as former professional World of Warcraft player, felt he has grown in his professional abilities as well. “I’ve definitely learned a lot about communication and interpersonal skills, which I’m sure will carry over into whatever I do next. I’ve always been an introverted, quiet type, and I hate making decisions, telling people what to do, and giving presentations, so coaching a group of high school kids who actually look up to me and listen to what I have to say has been new, exciting, and a little nerve-wracking for me. I’m super grateful that the students at Samueli [Academy] are so, so easy to work with — no drama, no fighting, no unsportsmanlike behavior, etc. — because it let me focus on getting to know them and helping them get better at the game, rather than having to deal with any sort of petty interpersonal drama, which I doubt I would have handled particularly well.”

Well-Played

Early research on the league is pointing to value for both players and coaches, aligning with existing research on the potential benefits of participation in team sports. This includes higher GPAs for high school students, an increased satisfaction with school, and personal growth. When asked about his experience within the league as a coach, Calvin Gao, a freshman computer science major at UCI said he found coaching to be “…quite difficult since a lot of the high schoolers don’t seem interested in our conversations. I feel this is a large learning experience since I got to revisit how high schoolers behave and interact with their teachers and coaches through a gaming perspective outside of a classroom environment.”

The Orange County High School Esports league wraps up its inaugural season April 28 and the Samueli Foundation has plans to scale the league in the coming years. The work in unpredictable but as Drew Hansen, a recent biology grad and med school-hopeful said about his experience coaching in the league this season, “Sure, most of the time things do not go as planned. But if you are adaptive you can still make things work out well in the end.”

How An Esports League Is Changing Learning After School was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve picked 10 of the best offline Minecraft-themed activities I could find. All were created by fellow Minecraft parents, are affordable (if not free!), and easy to do.

The list includes COOKING activities, like making your own Minecraft themed pizzas, fortune cookies, and cake villages. The CRAFTING activities include DIY pillows, papercraft, and story cubes. And the CREATING activities will have your family making their own diamond swords and pickaxes, wind-up Creepers, backyard treasure hunts, and board games together. Mix-and-match to create awesome Minecraft themed playdates and birthday parties. Enjoy!

COOKING

1. Make a Minecraft Creeper Pizza

Making pizza together is a great way to have fun as a family. This Creeper-themed cheese and pepperoni pizza is the perfect blend of mozzarella, math, and Minecraft. Improvise with your own ingredients or get the recipe from Catch My Party.

2. Make Minecraft Fortune Cookies

What kid wouldn’t love to crack open a fortune cookie with a Minecrafty fortune inside? Get creative with the fortunes or use this starter set from Sprout, Squidge, and Moppet. Recipe courtesy of allrecipes.com.

A zombie walks in the shadow of the horseBuild your towers higher than the deepest mineA diamond pickaxe is worth a myriad of mooshroomsProsperity comes to the villager with a saddle for each horseLight your torches early and live to see another sunriseBuried obsidian is on your horizonThe lava bubbles fortuitouslyCreepers hiss, endermen groan, choose your voice wisely

3. Make a Minecraft Cake Village

Making a Minecraft cake village will keep your family busy for hours and provide ample opportunities for conversation and collaboration. See a video tutorial here.

CRAFTING

4. Papercraft: Print and Make a Real-Life Minecraft World

Google “Minecraft papercraft” and prepare to be amazed at the creativity that awaits you. Printables like the Minecraft cow above can be found on this site, along with many others. Print this page, cut and fold to create your first mini model.

5. DIY Minecraft No Sew Pillows

While your kid may be able to navigate a keyboard, threading a needle may be another story. These “no sew” pillows are easy to make and super fun to create. Find the tutorial here.

6. Minecraft Story Cubes

Your kids probably know the world of Minecraft inside and out. These clever story cubes use that knowledge to kick start hours of storytelling fun. Here’s an example generated from the cubes above, courtesy of Milk and Cookies.

You are an Iron Golem. You are in the jungle.

You have armor and diamonds with you. Your goal is to harvest.

Your enemy is the Ender Dragon.

Uh oh, zombie pigmen are coming after you! What do you do?

To make things worse, a creeper just destroyed your house!

Print out the templates and instructions for the story cubes here.

CREATING

7. Create a Backyard Treasure Hunt, Minecraft Style

Get out of the house and into the great outdoors. Create your very own Minecraft-style adventure map, complete with quests and riddles.

8. Make a Diamond Sword and Pickaxe

While Halloween only comes once a year your kids will put this diamond sword and pickaxe to endless use. Access templates and a tutorial here.

If you have a little Minecrafter, a Lego pickaxe might be more their style.

9. Create a Wind-up Minecraft Creeper

The wind-up Creeper takes papercraft to the next level. Create one or an entire hostile mob! Step-by-step instructions can be found here.

10. Make and Play a Minecraft Board Game

Tired of Monopoly and Uno? Why not make and then play a Minecraft-themed board game. I found this one for you to try.

Nurturing an Interest

We know from research that kids, like adults, get better at things they care about when they find the right environment in which to flourish. While there are many great environments outside the home designed for this, like Connected Camps Afterschool Labs, your family can end up providing the best context of all. Your kid can be themselves and share something their passionate about with the ones they love. Be supportive, encouraging and don’t be afraid to let your child struggle a little — failure is a great teacher.

10 Easy Offline Minecraft Activities for Family Fun was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve picked 10 of the best offline Minecraft-themed activities I could find. All were created by fellow Minecraft parents, are affordable (if not free!), and easy to do.

The list includes COOKING activities, like making your own Minecraft themed pizzas, fortune cookies, and cake villages. The CRAFTING activities include DIY pillows, papercraft, and story cubes. And the CREATING activities will have your family making their own diamond swords and pickaxes, wind-up Creepers, backyard treasure hunts, and board games together. Mix-and-match to create awesome Minecraft themed playdates and birthday parties. Enjoy!

COOKING

1. Make a Minecraft Creeper Pizza

Making pizza together is a great way to have fun as a family. This Creeper-themed cheese and pepperoni pizza is the perfect blend of mozzarella, math, and Minecraft. Improvise with your own ingredients or get the recipe from Catch My Party.

2. Make Minecraft Fortune Cookies

What kid wouldn’t love to crack open a fortune cookie with a Minecrafty fortune inside? Get creative with the fortunes or use this starter set from Sprout, Squidge, and Moppet. Recipe courtesy of allrecipes.com.

A zombie walks in the shadow of the horseBuild your towers higher than the deepest mineA diamond pickaxe is worth a myriad of mooshroomsProsperity comes to the villager with a saddle for each horseLight your torches early and live to see another sunriseBuried obsidian is on your horizonThe lava bubbles fortuitouslyCreepers hiss, endermen groan, choose your voice wisely

3. Make a Minecraft Cake Village

Making a Minecraft cake village will keep your family busy for hours and provide ample opportunities for conversation and collaboration. See a video tutorial here.

CRAFTING

4. Papercraft: Print and Make a Real-Life Minecraft World

Google “Minecraft papercraft” and prepare to be amazed at the creativity that awaits you. Printables like the Minecraft cow above can be found on this site, along with many others. Print this page, cut and fold to create your first mini model.

5. DIY Minecraft No Sew Pillows

While your kid may be able to navigate a keyboard, threading a needle may be another story. These “no sew” pillows are easy to make and super fun to create. Find the tutorial here.

6. Minecraft Story Cubes

Your kids probably know the world of Minecraft inside and out. These clever story cubes use that knowledge to kick start hours of storytelling fun. Here’s an example generated from the cubes above, courtesy of Milk and Cookies.

You are an Iron Golem. You are in the jungle.

You have armor and diamonds with you. Your goal is to harvest.

Your enemy is the Ender Dragon.

Uh oh, zombie pigmen are coming after you! What do you do?

To make things worse, a creeper just destroyed your house!

Print out the templates and instructions for the story cubes here.

CREATING

7. Create a Backyard Treasure Hunt, Minecraft Style

Get out of the house and into the great outdoors. Create your very own Minecraft-style adventure map, complete with quests and riddles.

8. Make a Diamond Sword and Pickaxe

While Halloween only comes once a year your kids will put this diamond sword and pickaxe to endless use. Access templates and a tutorial here.

If you have a little Minecrafter, a Lego pickaxe might be more their style.

9. Create a Wind-up Minecraft Creeper

The wind-up Creeper takes papercraft to the next level. Create one or an entire hostile mob! Step-by-step instructions can be found here.

10. Make and Play a Minecraft Board Game

Tired of Monopoly and Uno? Why not make and then play a Minecraft-themed board game. I found this one for you to try.

Nurturing an Interest

We know from research that kids, like adults, get better at things they care about when they find the right environment in which to flourish. While there are many great environments outside the home designed for this, like Connected Camps Afterschool Labs, your family can end up providing the best context of all. Your kid can be themselves and share something their passionate about with the ones they love. Be supportive, encouraging and don’t be afraid to let your child struggle a little — failure is a great teacher.

Recent political and weather events like those in Charlottesville, Houston, and Florida offer a snapshot of a world in which knowing how to problem-solve, manage resources, cooperate, negotiate, and plan may mean the difference between life and death. Learning how to survive and thrive in a world shaped by conflict, change, and catastrophe requires life skills. Knowing how to nurture these skills is an important connected parenting superpower to have.Minecraft, especially when played with others, offers a great platform for this work. Players flex their creative and problem solving skills as they build shelters, fight off mobs, and seek out and mine hard-to-find resources. They also develop skills as planners, decision-makers, and collaborators in their quest to complete epic (or even not-so-epic) builds. To do this they must prioritize and persevere. They must be able to communicate and resolve conflict. They must know how to ask for help, coordinate their efforts with others, and manage their time.

Research shows that building such skills requires repetition and practice. Providing multiple contexts for kids to develop their skills is one way to help them flourish. This might mean participating in programs like Connected Camps Afterschool, but could also include offline activities like cooking, project-based playdates, making maps, or gardening. Following are 10 essential life skills kids can nurture through Minecraft, and ways you can support your child’s learning.

Social Skills

1. Teamwork

Kids who play Minecraft with others quickly recognize the benefits of teamwork. Having a grand idea is one thing; having the resources to implement the idea is another. Learning how to recruit team members, pool resources, negotiate designs, and assign roles to one another is all part of learning how to realize one’s ideas. In survival mode, teamwork takes the form of building a defense, and coordinating and executing battle plans. Teaching and learning from others is a central feature of the game.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn solo work into teamwork by including your kids in household projects.
• Enroll in summer camp: most camps are filled with team-building activities, including our own.
• Share an expert account of how to create a build team in Minecraft

2. Strategic Communication

Evidence suggests that communication is the foundation of relationships and is essential for learning, play, and social interaction. In Minecraft, the chatter of online play is both social and strategic. To get anything done, kids must learn how to talk to each other. This includes learning how to get their message across, share ideas, give and get feedback, and say what they want others to do. Learning how to be effective communicators while using global chat and voice chat tools like Teamspeak or Discord can lead to increased confidence and self-esteem.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

3. Asking for Help

Asking for help is something many people have trouble doing. Kids are no exception. In a culture where independence is so strongly valued, asking for help makes some people feel weak or concerned about what might be asked of them in return. Minecraft turns the tables on this situation by offering a context in which players are motivated to value the craftsmanship and skills of others, while also sharing knowledge and innovations. This is especially true in creative multiplayer mode, where kids of different skill levels build and play together. Asking for help is seen as a way to share and acknowledge the expertise of others.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Be a role model: pick a project for you and your child to work on together that is outside of your realm of expertise. Seek out help from others to complete the project, showing your child how effective and rewarding asking for help can be.
• Encourage your child’s Minecraft YouTube habit, especially How-To videos, which we’ve written about here.
• Help your child learn to use online Minecraft forums as a resource for their questions.

Emotional Skills

4. Persistence

Minecraft comes without an instruction book. Its gameplay can, at times, seem punishingly repetitive: mine, mine, mine, craft, build, repeat. Learning to build complex structures is hard; mastering redstone even harder. Despite all this, kids love to play the game. Why? One reason is that working hard can feel really good. Minecraft encourages and rewards deep focus. The game teaches kids that persisting on a problem is a way for them to achieve their gameplay goals.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Reward optimistic thinking, especially when that optimism is connected to a goal. Researchshows that positive thinking can lead people to be more resilient in the face of day-to-day struggles.
• Expect more: Encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone. Help them stretch their own goals for what they want to accomplish in Minecraft by sharing videos of truly epic builds.
• Teach your child to cook! Choose one or more of these dishes to master together.

5. Recovery from Failure

Disasters happen all the time in Minecraft. Stuff gets blown up and burned down. Players spend hours building up an inventory only to lose it all. Mojang, the developer of the game, updates the game, adds new features and suddenly players no longer know how to play. Learning how how to recover from failure quickly, positively, and with new knowledge about what not to do the next time deepens a player’s relationship with the game. As kids acclimate to a world where change is constant and rebuilding is expected, the more resilient they become.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to share their mistakes with others. Doing so will help them see failure as both an opportunity to learn (“Well, that didn’t work!”) and as a chance to save others from a similar fate.
• Let them play games. Games like Minecraft offer an environment where it’s OK to fail. As a result, kids see it as a safe space to get things wrong.
• Garden together: nature provides ample opportunities for learning to recover from failure!

6. Negotiation

Multiplayer Minecraft offers lots of opportunities for interpersonal conflict. In survival mode players compete for resources. Creative mode players often clash while working on projects together. Learning to negotiate with others to get what you want is an acquired expertise. Because Minecraft offers a fairly low stakes environment for taking risks, kids can try out different negotiating strategies. On moderated servers like Kid Club, the online counselors take it one step further: they work with kids to see conflict as a problem to be solved, rather than a context for assigning blame.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to be a good listener.
• Host a family board game night and play Diplomacy.

Organizational Skills

7. Planning

Not everyone is a planner by nature and you might have a child that loves to dive in head first without any pre-planning. This probably works out some of the time, but not always. This is true in Minecraft as well. Players can get away with a “design-it-as-I-go” attitude in creative mode, given that resources are unlimited. But being able to achieve really complex builds, or excelling in survival mode requires players to plan ahead. Kids develop their own strategies for doing so, including making maps, drawing sketches, and breaking down and assigning tasks to members of their team.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Encourage your child to keep a Minecraft sketchbook. When they come up with an idea for something to build, ask them to sketch out what it will look like when it is complete.
• Before your child starts to recruit others to help them build, have them think through all the different tasks that need to be completed. Help them prioritize the list and assign time estimates to each.

8. Time Management

When your child sets off to build a mega rollercoaster in Minecraft with the help of three friends, time becomes an important resource to manage. Your child not only needs to be able to prioritize tasks per their importance to their overall goal, but also judge how long it will take to complete each task. Given that most kids play Minecraft for a limited number of hours each day or week, they have to learn — by trial and error, mostly — how much building or mining or crafting can be done in a typical session. In survival mode players must take time into account when planning a day’s activities, as dangers lurk in the shadows once night falls.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Do a project where you and your child create a circle graph of your perfect day. Compare results!
• Have your child set a goal for each session of Minecraft, thinking through what they want to accomplish within a concrete time frame.

9. Decision-Making

Children develop the capacity to make decisions with experience and maturity. To do so they must learn to know when a decision needs to be made, think of possible options, evaluate those options and then choose one to deploy. With experience they learn to review their decisions, reflecting on the outcomes of the decisions made. Minecraft creates a wonderful context for kids to hone these skills, given the control players have over what to do in the world. The game’s open-ended nature demands decisions from its players, posing the challenge, “Now what will you do?”

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Play strategy board games like Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, and Dominion.
• Coach your child through tough decisions. This post offers some great tips for how.

10. Spatial Awareness

Minecraft is often referred to as virtual Legos and the comparison is apt. With both, players must learn how to manipulate objects in space in a way that helps them create more complex structures. The ability to visualize objects — and the way they fit into a space — is what experts call spatial awareness. Building anything in Minecraft requires differing degrees of spatial awareness: players must learn to estimate the number of blocks needed to construct a house or farm, for example, by calculating the distance between two points.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn off the GPS.
• Make maps.
• Play with Legos and puzzles.

Future Matters

Helping your child develop a sense of independence and preparedness for the future takes time, effort, and a little ingenuity. Use the ideas offered here as a jumping off point for activities that will have relevance for your family and fit into the rhythm of daily life. Connecting with your child around their interest in Minecraft not only grows life skills but allows you to share in the fun!

10 Life Skills Parents Can Nurture through Minecraft was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recent political and weather events like those in Charlottesville, Houston, and Florida offer a snapshot of a world in which knowing how to problem-solve, manage resources, cooperate, negotiate, and plan may mean the difference between life and death. Learning how to survive and thrive in a world shaped by conflict, change, and catastrophe requires life skills. Knowing how to nurture these skills is an important connected parenting superpower to have.

Minecraft, especially when played with others, offers a great platform for this work. Players flex their creative and problem solving skills as they build shelters, fight off mobs, and seek out and mine hard-to-find resources. They also develop skills as planners, decision-makers, and collaborators in their quest to complete epic (or even not-so-epic) builds. To do this they must prioritize and persevere. They must be able to communicate and resolve conflict. They must know how to ask for help, coordinate their efforts with others, and manage their time.

Research shows that building such skills requires repetition and practice. Providing multiple contexts for kids to develop their skills is one way to help them flourish. This might mean participating in programs like Connected Camps Afterschool, but could also include offline activities like cooking, project-based playdates, making maps, or gardening. Following are 10 essential life skills kids can nurture through Minecraft, and ways you can support your child’s learning.

Social Skills

1. Teamwork

Kids who play Minecraft with others quickly recognize the benefits of teamwork. Having a grand idea is one thing; having the resources to implement the idea is another. Learning how to recruit team members, pool resources, negotiate designs, and assign roles to one another is all part of learning how to realize one’s ideas. In survival mode, teamwork takes the form of building a defense, and coordinating and executing battle plans. Teaching and learning from others is a central feature of the game.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn solo work into teamwork by including your kids in household projects.
• Enroll in summer camp: most camps are filled with team-building activities, including our own.
• Share an expert account of how to create a build team in Minecraft

2. Strategic Communication

Evidence suggests that communication is the foundation of relationships and is essential for learning, play, and social interaction. In Minecraft, the chatter of online play is both social and strategic. To get anything done, kids must learn how to talk to each other. This includes learning how to get their message across, share ideas, give and get feedback, and say what they want others to do. Learning how to be effective communicators while using global chat and voice chat tools like Teamspeak or Discord can lead to increased confidence and self-esteem.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

3. Asking for Help

Asking for help is something many people have trouble doing. Kids are no exception. In a culture where independence is so strongly valued, asking for help makes some people feel weak or concerned about what might be asked of them in return. Minecraft turns the tables on this situation by offering a context in which players are motivated to value the craftsmanship and skills of others, while also sharing knowledge and innovations. This is especially true in creative multiplayer mode, where kids of different skill levels build and play together. Asking for help is seen as a way to share and acknowledge the expertise of others.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Be a role model: pick a project for you and your child to work on together that is outside of your realm of expertise. Seek out help from others to complete the project, showing your child how effective and rewarding asking for help can be.
• Encourage your child’s Minecraft YouTube habit, especially How-To videos, which we’ve written about here.
• Help your child learn to use online Minecraft forums as a resource for their questions.

Emotional Skills

4. Persistence

Minecraft comes without an instruction book. Its gameplay can, at times, seem punishingly repetitive: mine, mine, mine, craft, build, repeat. Learning to build complex structures is hard; mastering redstone even harder. Despite all this, kids love to play the game. Why? One reason is that working hard can feel really good. Minecraft encourages and rewards deep focus. The game teaches kids that persisting on a problem is a way for them to achieve their gameplay goals.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Reward optimistic thinking, especially when that optimism is connected to a goal. Researchshows that positive thinking can lead people to be more resilient in the face of day-to-day struggles.
• Expect more: Encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone. Help them stretch their own goals for what they want to accomplish in Minecraft by sharing videos of truly epic builds.
• Teach your child to cook! Choose one or more of these dishes to master together.

5. Recovery from Failure

Disasters happen all the time in Minecraft. Stuff gets blown up and burned down. Players spend hours building up an inventory only to lose it all. Mojang, the developer of the game, updates the game, adds new features and suddenly players no longer know how to play. Learning how how to recover from failure quickly, positively, and with new knowledge about what not to do the next time deepens a player’s relationship with the game. As kids acclimate to a world where change is constant and rebuilding is expected, the more resilient they become.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to share their mistakes with others. Doing so will help them see failure as both an opportunity to learn (“Well, that didn’t work!”) and as a chance to save others from a similar fate.
• Let them play games. Games like Minecraft offer an environment where it’s OK to fail. As a result, kids see it as a safe space to get things wrong.
• Garden together: nature provides ample opportunities for learning to recover from failure!

6. Negotiation

Multiplayer Minecraft offers lots of opportunities for interpersonal conflict. In survival mode players compete for resources. Creative mode players often clash while working on projects together. Learning to negotiate with others to get what you want is an acquired expertise. Because Minecraft offers a fairly low stakes environment for taking risks, kids can try out different negotiating strategies. On moderated servers like Kid Club, the online counselors take it one step further: they work with kids to see conflict as a problem to be solved, rather than a context for assigning blame.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to be a good listener.
• Host a family board game night and play Diplomacy.

Organizational Skills

7. Planning

Not everyone is a planner by nature and you might have a child that loves to dive in head first without any pre-planning. This probably works out some of the time, but not always. This is true in Minecraft as well. Players can get away with a “design-it-as-I-go” attitude in creative mode, given that resources are unlimited. But being able to achieve really complex builds, or excelling in survival mode requires players to plan ahead. Kids develop their own strategies for doing so, including making maps, drawing sketches, and breaking down and assigning tasks to members of their team.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Encourage your child to keep a Minecraft sketchbook. When they come up with an idea for something to build, ask them to sketch out what it will look like when it is complete.
• Before your child starts to recruit others to help them build, have them think through all the different tasks that need to be completed. Help them prioritize the list and assign time estimates to each.

8. Time Management

When your child sets off to build a mega rollercoaster in Minecraft with the help of three friends, time becomes an important resource to manage. Your child not only needs to be able to prioritize tasks per their importance to their overall goal, but also judge how long it will take to complete each task. Given that most kids play Minecraft for a limited number of hours each day or week, they have to learn — by trial and error, mostly — how much building or mining or crafting can be done in a typical session. In survival mode players must take time into account when planning a day’s activities, as dangers lurk in the shadows once night falls.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Do a project where you and your child create a circle graph of your perfect day. Compare results!
• Have your child set a goal for each session of Minecraft, thinking through what they want to accomplish within a concrete time frame.

9. Decision-Making

Children develop the capacity to make decisions with experience and maturity. To do so they must learn to know when a decision needs to be made, think of possible options, evaluate those options and then choose one to deploy. With experience they learn to review their decisions, reflecting on the outcomes of the decisions made. Minecraft creates a wonderful context for kids to hone these skills, given the control players have over what to do in the world. The game’s open-ended nature demands decisions from its players, posing the challenge, “Now what will you do?”

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Play strategy board games like Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, and Dominion.
• Coach your child through tough decisions. This post offers some great tips for how.

10. Spatial Awareness

Minecraft is often referred to as virtual Legos and the comparison is apt. With both, players must learn how to manipulate objects in space in a way that helps them create more complex structures. The ability to visualize objects — and the way they fit into a space — is what experts call spatial awareness. Building anything in Minecraft requires differing degrees of spatial awareness: players must learn to estimate the number of blocks needed to construct a house or farm, for example, by calculating the distance between two points.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn off the GPS.
• Make maps.
• Play with Legos and puzzles.

Future Matters

Helping your child develop a sense of independence and preparedness for the future takes time, effort, and a little ingenuity. Use the ideas offered here as a jumping off point for activities that will have relevance for your family and fit into the rhythm of daily life. Connecting with your child around their interest in Minecraft not only grows life skills but allows you to share in the fun!

Minecraft, especially when played with others, offers a great platform for this work. Players flex their creative and problem solving skills as they build shelters, fight off mobs, and seek out and mine hard-to-find resources. They also develop skills as planners, decision-makers, and collaborators in their quest to complete epic (or even not-so-epic) builds. To do this they must prioritize and persevere. They must be able to communicate and resolve conflict. They must know how to ask for help, coordinate their efforts with others, and manage their time.

Research shows that building such skills requires repetition and practice. Providing multiple contexts for kids to develop their skills is one way to help them flourish. This might mean participating in programs like Connected Camps Afterschool, but could also include offline activities like cooking, project-based playdates, making maps, or gardening. Following are 10 essential life skills kids can nurture through Minecraft, and ways you can support your child’s learning.

Social Skills

1. Teamwork

Kids who play Minecraft with others quickly recognize the benefits of teamwork. Having a grand idea is one thing; having the resources to implement the idea is another. Learning how to recruit team members, pool resources, negotiate designs, and assign roles to one another is all part of learning how to realize one’s ideas. In survival mode, teamwork takes the form of building a defense, and coordinating and executing battle plans. Teaching and learning from others is a central feature of the game.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn solo work into teamwork by including your kids in household projects.
• Enroll in summer camp: most camps are filled with team-building activities, including our own.
• Share an expert account of how to create a build team in Minecraft

2. Strategic Communication

Evidence suggests that communication is the foundation of relationships and is essential for learning, play, and social interaction. In Minecraft, the chatter of online play is both social and strategic. To get anything done, kids must learn how to talk to each other. This includes learning how to get their message across, share ideas, give and get feedback, and say what they want others to do. Learning how to be effective communicators while using global chat and voice chat tools like Teamspeak or Discord can lead to increased confidence and self-esteem.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Give your kids the Exact Instructions challenge:

3. Asking for Help

Asking for help is something many people have trouble doing. Kids are no exception. In a culture where independence is so strongly valued, asking for help makes some people feel weak or concerned about what might be asked of them in return. Minecraft turns the tables on this situation by offering a context in which players are motivated to value the craftsmanship and skills of others, while also sharing knowledge and innovations. This is especially true in creative multiplayer mode, where kids of different skill levels build and play together. Asking for help is seen as a way to share and acknowledge the expertise of others.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Be a role model: pick a project for you and your child to work on together that is outside of your realm of expertise. Seek out help from others to complete the project, showing your child how effective and rewarding asking for help can be.
• Encourage your child’s Minecraft YouTube habit, especially How-To videos, which we’ve written about here.
• Help your child learn to use online Minecraft forums as a resource for their questions.

Emotional Skills

4. Persistence

Minecraft comes without an instruction book. Its gameplay can, at times, seem punishingly repetitive: mine, mine, mine, craft, build, repeat. Learning to build complex structures is hard; mastering redstone even harder. Despite all this, kids love to play the game. Why? One reason is that working hard can feel really good. Minecraft encourages and rewards deep focus. The game teaches kids that persisting on a problem is a way for them to achieve their gameplay goals.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Reward optimistic thinking, especially when that optimism is connected to a goal. Researchshows that positive thinking can lead people to be more resilient in the face of day-to-day struggles.
• Expect more: Encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone. Help them stretch their own goals for what they want to accomplish in Minecraft by sharing videos of truly epic builds.
• Teach your child to cook! Choose one or more of these dishes to master together.

5. Recovery from Failure

Disasters happen all the time in Minecraft. Stuff gets blown up and burned down. Players spend hours building up an inventory only to lose it all. Mojang, the developer of the game, updates the game, adds new features and suddenly players no longer know how to play. Learning how how to recover from failure quickly, positively, and with new knowledge about what not to do the next time deepens a player’s relationship with the game. As kids acclimate to a world where change is constant and rebuilding is expected, the more resilient they become.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to share their mistakes with others. Doing so will help them see failure as both an opportunity to learn (“Well, that didn’t work!”) and as a chance to save others from a similar fate.
• Let them play games. Games like Minecraft offer an environment where it’s OK to fail. As a result, kids see it as a safe space to get things wrong.
• Garden together: nature provides ample opportunities for learning to recover from failure!

6. Negotiation

Multiplayer Minecraft offers lots of opportunities for interpersonal conflict. In survival mode players compete for resources. Creative mode players often clash while working on projects together. Learning to negotiate with others to get what you want is an acquired expertise. Because Minecraft offers a fairly low stakes environment for taking risks, kids can try out different negotiating strategies. On moderated servers like Kid Club, the online counselors take it one step further: they work with kids to see conflict as a problem to be solved, rather than a context for assigning blame.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Teach your child to be a good listener.
• Host a family board game night and play Diplomacy.

Organizational Skills

7. Planning

Not everyone is a planner by nature and you might have a child that loves to dive in head first without any pre-planning. This probably works out some of the time, but not always. This is true in Minecraft as well. Players can get away with a “design-it-as-I-go” attitude in creative mode, given that resources are unlimited. But being able to achieve really complex builds, or excelling in survival mode requires players to plan ahead. Kids develop their own strategies for doing so, including making maps, drawing sketches, and breaking down and assigning tasks to members of their team.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Encourage your child to keep a Minecraft sketchbook. When they come up with an idea for something to build, ask them to sketch out what it will look like when it is complete.
• Before your child starts to recruit others to help them build, have them think through all the different tasks that need to be completed. Help them prioritize the list and assign time estimates to each.

8. Time Management

When your child sets off to build a mega rollercoaster in Minecraft with the help of three friends, time becomes an important resource to manage. Your child not only needs to be able to prioritize tasks per their importance to their overall goal, but also judge how long it will take to complete each task. Given that most kids play Minecraft for a limited number of hours each day or week, they have to learn — by trial and error, mostly — how much building or mining or crafting can be done in a typical session. In survival mode players must take time into account when planning a day’s activities, as dangers lurk in the shadows once night falls.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Do a project where you and your child create a circle graph of your perfect day. Compare results!
• Have your child set a goal for each session of Minecraft, thinking through what they want to accomplish within a concrete time frame.

9. Decision-Making

Children develop the capacity to make decisions with experience and maturity. To do so they must learn to know when a decision needs to be made, think of possible options, evaluate those options and then choose one to deploy. With experience they learn to review their decisions, reflecting on the outcomes of the decisions made. Minecraft creates a wonderful context for kids to hone these skills, given the control players have over what to do in the world. The game’s open-ended nature demands decisions from its players, posing the challenge, “Now what will you do?”

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Play strategy board games like Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, and Dominion.
• Coach your child through tough decisions. This post offers some great tips for how.

10. Spatial Awareness

Minecraft is often referred to as virtual Legos and the comparison is apt. With both, players must learn how to manipulate objects in space in a way that helps them create more complex structures. The ability to visualize objects — and the way they fit into a space — is what experts call spatial awareness. Building anything in Minecraft requires differing degrees of spatial awareness: players must learn to estimate the number of blocks needed to construct a house or farm, for example, by calculating the distance between two points.

What you can do to nurture this skill:

• Turn off the GPS.
• Make maps.
• Play with Legos and puzzles.

Future Matters

Helping your child develop a sense of independence and preparedness for the future takes time, effort, and a little ingenuity. Use the ideas offered here as a jumping off point for activities that will have relevance for your family and fit into the rhythm of daily life. Connecting with your child around their interest in Minecraft not only grows life skills but allows you to share in the fun!

SallyGreenGamer is a mom, a gamer, and a YouTube star. Her audience? Kids who love Minecraft. Her YouTube channel features videos of her playing the game and she runs a weekly Saturday morning livestream where she plays Minecraft and interacts with her fans online. Her videos have been viewed more than 34 million times.

If you find this statistic hard to believe, you’re not alone. We hear from parents who are perplexed that their kids love to watch videos about Minecraft on YouTube.

Why are their kids watching so much Minecraft on YouTube? Isn’t it more fun to actually play the game?

The answers aren’t obvious. Kids can learn a lot by playing the game, as well as watching videos. Here’s why kids watch, what they can learn, and where to find Minecraft YouTube content that is safe and family-friendly.

Why Kids Watch

When Amazon bought the video game streaming site Twitch in 2014 for almost $1 billion it was a sign that it wasn’t only kids that loved to watching video game players. On Twitch, people watch others play games and interact with them online. It’s fun, social, and strangely engaging.

Minecraft YouTubers like SallyGreenGamer tap into this same dynamic, creating video content in a social setting about a game kids love. Her 9am Saturday morning livestreams take the place of Saturday morning cartoons for many of them. Yet unlike the characters on the Disney Channel, her stories take place in a game world her fans know and love.

For many kids, Minecraft YouTubers are both aspirational and relatable; they are wowed by the idea that their favorite YouTuber is doing something that they can do too. “Role model” may not be the first word you think of seeing the creators of “Babysitting Troubles” or “Hunt Them Down! Hunt Them All!”. At the same time, we know kids thrive when they connect with others who have shared passions. Research shows that interacting with others around a love for something — a favorite book or band — not only feels good, but also powers learning.

Staying in the Loop

Another reason kids watch is because Minecraft YouTube videos are easy to access. According to CTIA 70 percent of households with children have a tablet. Many households are opting out of cable television in favor of streaming media. All a child needs to access YouTube is a device and an internet connection. SallyGreenGamer told me her #1 viewers are kids watching her videos on android tablets.

Some kids watch Minecraft on YouTube simply to stay in the loop with others in their social circle. Kids without access to the game or with little time to play use Minecraft videos as a surrogate for game play. The videos offer kids a chance to explore the lingo, lore, and popular personalities of Minecraft in ways that allow them to remain part of a fandom they share with their friends.

Understanding the Genres

Minecraft YouTubers tend to specialize in a specific style of Minecraft video. Some, like SallyGreenGamer, specialize in Let’s Play videos, which are among the most popular videos overall on YouTube. Others create scripted role plays, stream their play, or create detailed tutorials for the game. Recognizing these genres is key to understanding why your child may be watching.

Scripted Role Plays: It’s All About the Story

While it might be hard to imagine how anyone can wring an ounce of drama out of simple, 3D block characters YouTube stars like Aphmau have kids riveted. Her scripted stories give kids a platform for imagining stories set in the Minecraft universe. Many kids watching Minecraft videos don’t actually play Minecraft, choosing to connect to Minecraft’s rich world through animated storytelling. Kids consume scripted role plays as entertainment and watch them much like they watch TV.

Family-friendly Scripted Role Players to watch: Aphmau and MangoTango

Let’s Play: Connecting to Personalities

Let’s Play videos feature a gamer playing through Minecraft, offering their take on the game. The videos are funny and irreverent, and include editing, scripted narration, and larger than life personalities. Kids watch Let’s Plays to learn new skills and to be entertained. Many also love the social connection: they can comment on the videos and sometimes have the chance to play with their favorite Let’s Play personality on a public Minecraft server like Mineplex or Hipixel. There are more than 54 million Let’s Play Minecraft videos currently on YouTube, making it the most popular of all the genres.

Family-friendly Let’s Play YouTubers to watch: Bigbstatz, SallyGreenGamer, and StacyPlays

How-Tos: Learning From Experts

When Mojang released Minecraft there was no instruction booklet, no in-game tutorial or video series that explained how to play the game. Every single instructional resource to date has been created by players. How-To Minecraft videos teach players how to do specific things: how to make colored signs, build a lava door, or find fossils in Minecraft, for example. If your child is watching How Tos it’s a good indication that they are working on a new skill or trying to figure out how to progress in the game.

Family-friendly How-To YouTuber to watch: OMGcraft

Streamers: Interacting and Sharing

Minecraft YouTube Streamers are players who livestream their play online. Unlike Role Plays and Let’s Plays, Streamers skip the scripts and create experiences performed on the fly. Kids can interact with the streamer and other viewers through chat, making the experience a lot like interactive TV. Streams give kids a chance to geek out with others in a social setting, which can fuel both their interests and learning. If your child loves tuning into their favorite Minecraft YouTuber’s livestream or watching the videos of past streams, chances are they are doing it as a way to stay connected with friends.

Family-friendly Streamer to watch: KreekCraft

Ultimately, Minecraft videos offer different things to different kids. For the Saturday morning cartoon contingent, entertainment is top of mind. For others, YouTube provides a social platform for connecting around a shared interest. Other kids like the videos for the stories they tell. Some kids, like those enrolled in our online summer camps, might use Minecraft videos to help them hone a skill or learn how to do something new. The beauty of the Minecraft YouTube universe lies in its diversity: no matter your child’s interest, they’ll find a video to suit their needs.

Tips for Safe Viewing

All Minecraft videos are not created equal. Be aware that there are YouTubers who are consciously family-friendly and a vast majority who are not. Family-friendly YouTubers stick to kid-friendly content and avoid offensive language or imagery, gun violence, or adult themes.

You can use YouTube Kids or other apps like it to help your child find videos that are appropriate for their age. YouTube Kids uses algorithms to filter out inappropriate videos and includes a flagging system for parents for any that might slip through undetected. The app bars non-child-friendly ads and doesn’t allow comments. You can also look at the channels the YouTubers recommended here subscribe to, as another resource for additional family-friendly Minecrafters.

Special thanks to Steve Isaacs and SallyGreenGamer for their contributions to this post.

Are All Minecraft YouTube Videos a Waste of Time? was originally published in Connected Parenting on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.