Tyler (10) has been obsessed with Minecraft for quite a while now. The obsession started small, and grew in many ways. We started off playing the iPad version of the game, which I thought was enough. Then he graduated to playing the computer version on my iMac, but that STILL wasn’t enough. He started watching hundreds and hundreds of videos of YouTubers playing the game. Those YouTubers use mods, then he wanted mods, and on and on.
I really didn’t want my iMac used for this much Minecraft, since I use it for work, so I thought I would get him his own laptop. I didn’t want to just get him any old laptop for playing Minecraft, if you know me at all, I like to go all out.
I found an HP Stream 11 at a reasonable price, and the reviews said that it played Minecraft decently. For a 10 year old, that’s plenty good enough. I bought the laptop and then started thinking about how I could make it Minecraft themed.
I created a custom Minecraft skin for him, and then used that as the start of the idea for the laptop. Since the computer itself was a bright blue, I thought going with a Diamond theme would compliment well.
I designed all of the graphics that you see on the laptop itself, and got them printed from DecalGirl. I customized the desktop backgrounds with his Minecraft character, and I also designed the individual keys for the laptop.
The keys were the trickiest and most time consuming part. I looked up every key command used in the game, and made that the focal-point of the keys since that’s all he’s using it for. I continued with the Diamond theme on the keys, and made graphics and text for the Minecraft inputs, as well as the normal keyboard functions.
The GameBand was the last bit that I got for him. It’s a cool little third party device that looks very similar to like a FitBit. The Minecraft game is preloaded onto the device, and you wear it on your wrist, and unhook it and plug it into the USB. It saves all of your worlds on the device, as well as backing them up in the cloud. This worked perfect for Tyler since it frees up space and issues on the computer, and he can take it and play it anywhere. It was also really easy to install the mods that he wanted onto the band.
The LED display on the GameBand you can also customize and create animations on. So I included a clock, a redstone animation, and an animation of his name.
I had a LOT of fun creating this christmas present for Tyler, and he was ECSTATIC when he opened it.
