 I'm Perla Shaheen for CalTV News and this is my character inside the Minecraft simulation of UC Berkeley. Seniors expected to graduate this Saturday but the pandemic has put those plans on hold. For now the ceremony will be here in the virtual version of campus. I'm going to get a tour of this campus from one of the six students who came up with the idea. Hey Louise! Hey, what's up? So you are the CFO and co-founder of Blockly, the Minecraft version of Berkeley, UC Berkeley. And where are we right now? We are at Memorial Stadium, the Blockly edition of course. Oh my gosh, this is the whole football stadium and is this where the graduation the Cal graduation is supposed to take place? The Minecraft version? Yes, yes that's correct. It'll be taking place here. We have some chairs set up. So how did you make these chairs? It's pretty easy, you just choose them and then you click here and there you go. Whoa, are you building one right now? Yeah, I mean I just put one right now. But I can't do that because I don't have access to edit this stadium. Yes, unfortunately we can't just give access to everyone who joins just because we want to make sure no one you know misses up anything. We have an application for people who want to actually help build. Show me the rest of the campus. Let's fly. Think you double space to fly? Yes. Yay, I'm high up and I'm up. Okay, I'll follow you. Let's take a tour. This is all of Berkeley below me and over there is I-House. Yeah, let's go check out the I-House actually. Survived the drop. I notice that this is some room that they have fancy furniture usually. And as you walk up here this is the entrance to the cafeteria. Wow, like the dining hall. Yeah, this looks exactly like I-House. So what do you guys plan to do with this whole simulation? Yeah, so for now our big event is the graduation of course. We actually think this might be the biggest virtual graduation in the world. So we're very excited for the commencement. People will be able to interact with each other. But also Carol, Chris, and I mean our Chancellor and Mark Fisher each have like a Minecraft character as well. What? You made a Minecraft simulation of Carol, Chris, and Mark Fisher. Yeah, they're actually going to play the game and interact with the students during the graduation. We have a rehearsal tomorrow. So who else is going to make an appearance? We do have a guest speaker who is one of the co-founders of Minecraft and potentially another guest speaker which we're still kind of hoping to announce. Right after that we want to have like an after party. We're hosting a virtual festival. It's called the Blockly Music Festival or Blockly Block Party and we have a lot of top artists coming and performing. Oh man, don't step on it. You'll get a warning. Oh no, you stepped on the seal. Bye bye 4.0. So now we're on Memorial Glade and there's a bunch of Kiwi bots. You really captured the essence of Berkeley. Do you want to go to Moffit or do you want to go to Dough Library? Let's look at Dough Library. After all of this, after the commencement ceremony and the concert, what do you plan to do with this huge Minecraft simulation? Yeah, so we actually plan to have more concerts over the summer and every one of them will be raising funds for COVID relief and we do expect this to be a huge success. We expect to have bigger artists every time and more players. The campus tours, we already had one. For students, we're still choosing between Cal and a couple of other schools so we gave them a tour. We told them all about not stepping on seals, told them about the history of our libraries, everything. So you were a campus tour guide in the time of COVID-19 and you showed potential students campus through this Minecraft simulation. We had a pretty decent crowd actually. We had like over 300 viewers at the same time watching on Twitch. How hard was this to make? It was definitely very challenging because there's a lot of people that some of these people here like the blue are like the original co-founders as you can see. Oh wow. They're like oh yeah and then the other ones are people who joined us shortly after. So you engraved everyone who helped build this Minecraft simulation. You engraved their names into a wall in front of the library. Yeah exactly. They're the builders of Blockway. It's pretty cool. How long did this take to make? About six weeks or so. Initially there was only like four or five people that were doing it but it was not really happening. It was just like fun. I jumped in later when my friends rang. You have the bells ring every hour as well? Yep. Just like in real life. And then I guess a builder was like yo we're not going to finish on time. We need more help. So the guy posted it on Facebook and then that's when it really took off. How did the school reach out to you guys to you know work together to make this graduation happen? I guess the alumni of Berkeley were the ones who started sharing it more. They were pretty happy. People were you know sending us emails like from the class of 67. They were like wow like this is like the most Berkeley thing ever. I'm very proud of you. And then yeah like so the administration just started reaching out to us and they're like hey like can you tell us more? Like what is Minecraft you know? And once we kind of like told them that how it was possible how we planned to do it they were like oh yeah of course like you know it's fun ways to help you out. They you know they're sponsoring some of our servers. They're paying for like a lot of the hardware that we need to operate the systems. And there's the gate. The entrance. Yeah this is out of the gate. It's pretty clean. Look at it. How can people access this simulation? Oh yeah so anyone who wants to join the server and be able to you know walk around campus etc you can go ahead and check out blocklade.com. There's like step-by-steps including you know getting the game setting up the server. Anyone else who wants to just you know watch the commencement I believe the school is going to be sending out a link to their Twitch channel which will be streaming the whole commencement like the official one. And the music festival you can also go to our blocklade.com website and there will have links to the Twitch streams that will be having the music festival. Yeah I know my parents are excited to watch me graduate virtually. Of course. Well thank you Louise for meeting with me in the simulation and I'll see you at virtual graduation. Yeah no problem.