School stories / Spring 2020, the shutdown semester
Students Rebuilt Their School in Minecraft. The Faculty Lounge Was a Void.
When the Academy of the New Church closed in 2020, thirteen students rebuilt it, block by block. They knew every hallway. They had never been in one room.
In March 2020, two weeks into the shutdown at the Academy of the New Church Secondary Schools in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, a group of students began rebuilding their school in Minecraft. Their religion teacher, the Rev. Christopher Barber, had already recreated his own classroom in the game to record lectures in. The students decided to expand on that. Thirteen of them, over roughly two months, rebuilt the campus on a private server, first from memory and then from photographs and official school plans.
Barber wrote it up for the church magazine that summer, and his account includes a list of where the build departed from reality, which reads like a confession.
The dorms stood as shells, with the lobbies finished and furnished. The field house existed in what he called "a rudimentary and comically cavernous form." The new turf field, meanwhile, was finished in Minecraft well before the real contractors, who were stalled by state restrictions. The students put a soccer ball on it and, for reasons the magazine doesn't fully explain, a polar bear named after their English teacher, with a Frisbee.
And then the lounge. The departures from reality, Barber wrote, revealed "the builders' blind spots as students; the faculty lounge, for example, was a void and required faculty assistance to complete."
Every school has this room, and every child has the same map of it: a door, and then nothing. My children believe the teachers' lounge at their school contains a couch, a coffee machine and the answers to every test. I have been in one. It contained a couch, a coffee machine and a note on the refrigerator about whose yogurt was whose.
Then campus life moved into the replica. Barber led worship services in the virtual auditorium, with prelude, prayer, postlude and the Pledge of Allegiance. The students decorated it for Easter, held an Easter egg hunt on back campus, and set off an Easter fireworks show. And after chapel, students took turns giving the announcements, which, Barber reported, included the same news week after week: "Broomball is still cancelled."
They had built a world in which anything was possible, including fireworks indoors, and they still couldn't bring themselves to un-cancel broomball. That is how you know it was a real school.
In California that summer, Harker students built their own upper school in Minecraft, and one of the leads proudly reported a detail: the inside library room, "from which students are often ejected for being too loud," permanently has a red card next to its door.
We built our house in Minecraft too, the youngest and I, during a long weekend. She did the bedrooms. I did the kitchen. When we were finished, my office was a void. She said she had never been allowed in.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- New Church Life: The Minecraft Academy of the New Church newchurch.org
- Harker News: Students recreate upper school campus in Minecraft news.harker.org
- Academy of the New Church: Creative Construction ancss.org
- Packer: Upper School Students Recreate Packer in Minecraft packer.edu