Japan students 'telegraduate' on Minecraft after schools were shut due to coronavirus

Announcing new measures to combat coronavirus, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe earlier said that all schools in the country would be shut down starting from March 2. The precautionary move offered no choice to students who had to skip there graduation ceremonies which usually takes place between March and April. However, many schools came up with a unique workaround- having the graduation ceremony in Minecraft. 

Minecraft is a sandbox video game wherin players explore an intentionally blocky, pixelated, procedurally-generated 3D world. A series of pictures posted on Twitter showed a virtual graduation ceremony held in the video game. 

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The post also revealed that the ceremony was not set up by parents or faculty but by the students themselves. Later, a video of a Japanese kid participating in the ceremony surfaced followed by images from the graduation ceremony. 

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Unique graduation

The unique move was lauded by netizens who praised the children for their creativity. One user wrote, "That's amazing! ! Congratulations on your graduation! I'm sorry that I couldn't do a normal graduation ceremony, but it's a wonderful graduation ceremony! !" while another wrote that if adults could "telework" so can children have a "tele graduation ceremony. "Yet another wrote, "I feel like there is a possibility that I can never say that it is a child's play ... It is a victory of the idea!". Praising the idea, one user wrote, "I think these ideas are amazing". Meanwhile, another user wrote, "When I was ashamed of my Minecraft at the time (my son, 3), I didn't know what was interesting. Given as "unblocked building blocks". It may be one of the familiar stationery now."

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