HSE Pokrovka Complex Now in Minecraft

HSE has moved all activity online. Now you can not only study and work remotely, but also take a walk in your favorite HSE building on Pokrovka. On May 3, the grand opening of the building in Minecraft was held. HSE Life explored the interior of the virtual Pokrovka.

HSE Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov delivered a welcoming speech at the opening ceremony: ‘I congratulate you on this achievement. This is indeed an achievement. You have created your HSE University much faster than we did in seven years (I mean this building). I am sure that everything that you do next will be faster and more interesting than what we do,’ he said to the students from the atrium of the real building on Pokrovka.

Our photographer Daniil Prokofiev ‘walked’ around the new building and prepared a photo report from the opening ceremony, without leaving his desktop.

2nd-year student Roman Kurochkin, one of the project organizers, told HSE Life about the opening of the HSE building on Pokrovsky Boulevard in Minecraft.

Roman Kurochkin
Organizer, 2nd-year student, Bachelor’s Programme 'Information Science and Computation Technology'

Aziz, Olesya, and I worked as server administrators. We spent the whole day fixing bugs and helping student organizations hold their events.

We posted news about recruiting team members on the project page. We also asked who would like to be a volunteer in the application for the event. Volunteers replied and quickly got down to work. We are very grateful to all of them!

How did we come up with the idea to invite Rector Kuzminov? At the start of the project, Ivan Chernyavsky told us that he was aware that we were reconstructing the building in Minecraft, and he liked the idea. And since then, this thought has stuck in our head: ‘We definitely should invite Rector Kuzminov.’

Student organizations actively participated in the Project Open Day. We had no problems in communicating with the participants. Once again, we are convinced that our community is the coolest!

At the very beginning of the event there were some problems with the server, but soon we managed to solve them. There were no other serious problems. There were some misunderstandings in the game mechanics among users: we quickly tried to solve them in the tech support chat in Discord.

We are very happy that we managed to implement all our ideas. We even have elevators in the building! The project will be developed further. In the near future, we will ‘renovate’ the server for more stable operation and try to implement a few more ideas.

Follow the news on HSE Minecraft group.

Assistant to the Rector Ivan Chernyavsky told us about his mission in the building construction and how he managed to persuade the rector to ‘attend’ the opening of the virtual Pokrovka. 

Ivan Chernyavsky
Assistant to the Rector

I had a great mission: I told the students how good they were, introduced everyone to each other, and drew attention to the project. At the very beginning, it was clear that the students did not expect to get this degree of understanding and support from the university. When they found out that even the rector supported them, they felt very much inspired!

It took only one message to convince Rector Kuzminov, and after a couple of hours, colleagues who work with the rector at Pokrovka recorded his speech on their phones. I think the video shows how he sincerely liked the idea of our students.

May 04, 2020