Apex Hosting Minecraft Scholarship Winner 2026

When I was a kid, I lived in hospitals and clinics because I was sick with an autoimmune disorder called Aplastic Anemia. Being under medical supervision for hours was brutal – especially when there was little to do besides being prodded by nurses and doctors. Other parents allowed their kids to play video games to pass the time, but my parents were very wary of electronics. News outlets were releasing articles about violence caused by games like Doom and Halo. Eventually, they relented and allowed me to play so I could distract myself from my treatment. My parents were careful: no games with realistic guns or overt violence, and nothing that had internet access. I was raised on Fisher-Price plug-and-play’s until I was released from the hospital.

 

I was 6 when I first saw Minecraft. My brother was playing a game I didn’t recognize on the family computer. He was placing blocks and creating his “dream house.” Later that week, when he was away from the computer, I hijacked his account and made horrible redstone contraptions while taming an army of dogs. He was furious when he realized that I had messed with his world on his account. When he complained to our parents, he was told to share, but only agreed to let me play when he wasn’t home. This meant I was practically exiled to Minecraft Lite on my parents’ phone, where none of my worlds could be saved.

 

I was gifted my own copy of Minecraft in 4th grade by my uncle and used any excuse to play. Whenever a teacher assigned a project: history, chemistry, math, or Spanish, I begged to do it in Minecraft rather than make a poster or shadow box. Although I didn’t enjoy school, using Minecraft as a medium for projects engaged me and made learning fun!

 

During my last year of middle school, COVID hit, and I started to live and breathe Minecraft. It’s how I stayed connected with friends, entertained myself, and most importantly, cultivated my interest in engineering. I played the hell out of Steve’s Crashlanding, a mod about building factories and manufacturing. We would test machines in superflat worlds and try to make them efficient and as compact as possible for our underground base. We also messed with the Create mod to introduce factory modpacks to our friends, who usually played vanilla Minecraft. The Create mod introduced me to the idea of engineering, with its live belts, moving arms, and industrial mixers, which were grounded in reality rather than imaginary ender engines or bonsai factories from other mods.

 

Some of my favorite Minecraft school projects included a re-creation of a Spanish mission in 4th grade for elementary school history, an animated statue of a Roman man for middle school history, a rotating Bohr model of an atom for high school chemistry, and a water geyser exploding for natural sciences. Designing these to be built in Minecraft took research in order to accurately represent them.

 

Minecraft both engaged and inspired me to continue with my education in STEM: coding classes for Minecraft mods, engineering classes inspired by my factories, biology classes to learn more about the Minecraft world, and classes about circuitry and computers inspired by the redstone calculators that I watched others build. If Minecraft was not in my life, I don’t think I would have pursued engineering or higher education at all. Now, I am transferring into CSUN as a junior in mechanical engineering, and I can’t wait to design and construct real-life machines used in labs, just like I did in Minecraft.