Water flows how you think it would in minecraft but there is one major difference, its infinite. For example if you were standing at the top of a mountain and you placed 1 bucket of water it would flow down the mountain but would never stop. After a couple of seconds the entire mountain would be covered until you get rid of the first block. Even though you have a large amount of water flowing down the mountain you still technically only have 1 “block” of water and if you wanted to get more water into your bucket then you would have to take the first block at the top, then the rest of the water would slowly disappear. There is a way to get unlimited “blocks” of water though, as long you have at least 2 “buckets” of water to start with. If you put them into a 2x2 hole then you can take water out of that hole forever and it will always refill itself.

In real life water has a set volume and so how can knowing anything about the fake water in minecraft help with real life?  It can teach you to adapt. In life you may think that you know something, but one day it might change or work differently than it used to. You are going to have to use what you already know and learn some new things so that you can understand how it works now.



 
One of the most important skills in life that you will have to apply to every part of your day is problem solving. Since the world we live in isn't perfect we will always have problems and we have to know how to deal with them. The same goes for Minecraft, if you never had any problems in the game you would just stand there and board. Some of the problems are the same in real life and in minecraft so by knowing who to come up with a solution in minecraft can help you in real life. A major problem you face often in minecraft is when you lose everything, either because you died or because a monster blew it up. In Minecraft depending on what you're carrying with you, a very large amount of your materials can be lost. This means that all the time spent gathering and crafting everything was wasted. Sometimes you have no choice but to build your world from the ground up all over again and this is extremely frustrating. In real life you are bound to run into times where you will have to start over on what you're working on, so by having a little experience hopefully it won't be as stressful when this situation comes around in the real world.



 
In life you're going to need math, you may not need to know how to use quadratic formulas to graph parabolas but some basic math knowledge is useful. One of the main things in Minecraft that you can do is build things. To build something you have to know how much of your building material you’ll need. Say you were building the floor of your house, because all of the blocks in Minecraft are very well defined it is quite simple to take the how long and wide it has to be and simply multiply them together to find how many blocks of your material you will need. Because your going to be building a lot in Minecraft, eventually this becomes easier. Crafting is also another place where math is involved in Minecraft. When you are crafting tools and blocks you need to know who many of each you will need. For example if you want to build iron pick axe you will need 3 iron ingots and 2 sticks, but if you want to build something more complex like a cake you will need 3 buckets of milk, 3 bundles of wheat, 2 pieces of sugar, and 1 egg. Most likely you're not just going to be crafting one of these items so will have to know how much of the raw materials you will need. It may seem trivial because these calculations are very simple but after playing Minecraft for an extended period of time these skills will begin to strengthen.

These days almost everyone has a phone with a calculator on it so it is becoming less common for people to be able to do simple calculations in their head so by having this skill that was strengthened by Minecraft you can be a little ahead in life.



    Author

    Duane Cressman
    Mike Potworka