Damian Owerko
Penn "Minecraft" Fischer Library.
- Students at the University of Pennsylvania are recreating their campus on "Minecraft" after COVID-19 ended their semester early.
- Events including graduations and weddings have been moved online to "Minecraft," "Animal Crossing," and other online games since the coronavirus spread throughout the world.
- Most US colleges have moved to remote learning for the rest of the semester
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The school year at the University of Pennsylvania, like most other US colleges, is over, but some students weren't quite ready to leave.
A group of UPenn students set up a Minecraft server and coordinated recreating the campus together over the last two weeks of March. Since then, they've talked with Columbia University and Dartmouth University students working on similar projects to set up possible Hunger Games-like challenges between schools and made plans to host spring traditions in the server.
The block-building game "Minecraft," which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5 billion, has been one of the most popular games worldwide over the last 10 years. As of September, it had a staggering 112 million active players every month, a number that has reportedly grown to 145 million.
Colleges and universities across the US have sent students home and turned to remote learning for the rest of the semester. Some schools made the switch after a student tested positive for COVID-19, the coronavirus disease, while others did it preemptively. Colleges also noted the risk of bringing students back from spring break after they'd traveled all over the world.
While they can't be on campus, Penn students recreated their campus in painstaking detail, a process that is still ongoing. Take a look at their incredible work here.
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