After things settled down for a bit, we started reaching out to students and asked them about their personal experiences with online education during the lockdown. In a nutshell, we found out that students really missed the interaction with their peers, walking around on campus and in general felt quite lonely.

As Albert Einstein once said: “In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity”. Inspired by these words, we thought to ourselves: can we bring the interaction back a bit? What if we could just recreate our campus in a virtual world? 

And so we did! We rebuilt all EUR campus locations in Minecraft.

The campus was designed as a creative space. It is a way for students and staff to design their own interactions and discover new, innovative ways of engaging with one another through the virtual campus.

We started the project in April 2020 (about a month after the first lockdown was introduced in the Netherlands), and by August 2020 all campus locations were brought to life. This hasn’t gone unnoticed, the Dutch press was quite impressed (pun intended) and the Erasmus Virtual Campus was widely covered in the media.

Early in the project we tangled on the great people of Erasmus eSports, a student community for Erasmus students to meet other esports enthusiasts. They were of immense help and in fact laid the first building blocks in Minecraft.

Below you can find a video showing an earlier build of the campus.

Later on, we also called in the help of a professional Minecraft building team to polish up the final product.

Left an image of our campus shot by Ossip van Duivenbode and on the right an image of the virtual campus taken at the same angle.

Besides having a lot of fun and playing games in there such as scavenger hunts or hide and seek, there are also some more serious use cases that we have experimented with. For example, multiple events have been organized in the Minecraft world. The virtual campus is also used to onboard new (international) students and to provide guided tours for prospective students around the campus locations. Moreover, the team is also experimenting with ways to use the campus for educational purposes, together with Erasmus University professors.

Above you can see the results of an event we organized in Minecraft together with RSM’s Positive Change Initiative. The event was focused around the 17 United Nations’ Social Development Goals (SDGs), and students were asked to use their creativity to build things that would embody some of the UN SDGs.

In November 2021, the project was awarded with the Best in Class Award 2021. This annual award ceremony, organized by The Class Foundation since 2016, was established to “celebrate, recognize, and promote organizations and initiatives at the forefront of student and shared living, working, and learning”.

The project received its award in the category of Best Campus Development. The result was mainly determined by an expert jury, whose votes accounted for 80% of the result. The remaining 20% was determined through a public vote on LinkedIn, for which the project received over 70% of the votes.

Definitely! If you already own a copy of Minecraft, simply follow the instructions below. If you don’t own Minecraft, feel free to drop us an email at info.erasmusx@eur.nl and we’ll provide you with a guest account!