Virtual Bingo and Minecraft Graduation: During the Pandemic, College Students Recreate Campus Life at Home

Armed with food and drinks, bingo cards and daubers, about 100 Hanover College students pack the student-activities center on the second Tuesday of every month. At the tight-knit, 1,100-student college in southeastern Indiana, bingo is so popular that latecomers have to sit on the floor.

Students chat intermittently and sing along to music as the numbers are called, playing for small prizes like Amazon gift cards.

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When Hanover moved classes online for the rest of the semester amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Theresa Hitchcock, associate director of student life, wanted to find a way to replicate the bingo experience. She polled students to gauge their interest. When dozens said yes, she mailed them each a pack of 10 bingo cards.

Then, on the last Tuesday of March, 75 students and a handful of faculty and staff members packed the gallery view on Zoom for five bingo rounds.

Instead of socializing around tables, participants were alone in their homes. But they were joking around and yelling “Bingo!” as they normally would. Hitchcock was the DJ for the night, haphazardly streaming Spotify from a separate laptop and taking requests from the audience via Zoom chat. The whole event cost about $300.

“People laugh and say it’s just bingo,” Hitchcock said. But she knows how much her students miss their friends and their campus, and how much uncertainty the pandemic has caused. She’s afraid some students will drop out and never come back.

“It was a nice hour of normalcy in a time when nothing seems to make much sense,” she said.

As the pandemic escalates and people face health crises, financial challenges, job losses, and child-care issues, it might seem silly to think much about campus life and college traditions. But for millions of 18- to 20-somethings, going to college is a pivotal moment of newfound independence and relationship-building. Now many of them are back in their childhood bedrooms.

Sustaining connection and interaction is central to students’ well-being, said Betsy Cracco, executive director for well-being, access, and prevention at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “Many of these students chose to be on residential campuses because they wanted that connected experience,” Cracco said.

She cited the large body of research on how loneliness can harm physical and mental health. Being engaged with campus activities can also be a key retention tool, she added. “For a lot of students,” she said, “their involvement with their extracurriculars is their main identity on campus.”

That’s why students and colleges forced to finish out the semester remotely are trying to make the best of it — by recreating the campus experience at home.

‘Quaranteen U.’

Students aren’t walking to class or gathering on quads for the time being. But University of Pennsylvania students can heal their homesickness with a visit to the iconic Fisher Fine Arts Library in “Penncraft,” a Minecraft recreation of the campus in meticulous detail.

In the popular video game, where players use blocks to construct virtual communities, the library is complete with its “great window,” the small touches of green trim that appear along the castle-like brick building, and the softly lit study rooms inside. Next door, the recreation of College Hall, a vast academic building with an unusual green exterior, is just as impressive. Minecraft doesn’t perfectly capture the shade of green, but it’s pretty darn close. A virtual grassy quad sprawls out in front of the two structures, as it does in real life.

Boston University’s Minecraft campus is also “scarily accurate,” said Rudy Raveendran, a senior. One day, he entered the virtual version of the residence hall he lived in as a freshman and went up the elevator — and found his old dorm room.

Students have constructed pathways, trees, sculptures, and food trucks. And they are starting to plan campus traditions and events within the game.

Some students are even building a Minecraft complex to host 2020 graduations for students across the country; they call it “Quaranteen University.” Raveendran, who’s part of the team, said more than 800 students from about 270 colleges had signaled interest in participating so far. Logistics for the ceremony are still being ironed out, but he said the organizers would try to stagger the festivities to accommodate different time zones.

“While a virtual graduation through Minecraft is never going to live up to or be the same thing as doing it in person, we still think it’s important to have the space where students can come together and celebrate together,” Raveendran said. Minecraft commencement might even be more fun, in some ways. He said they would be able to add spontaneous fireworks and minigames to the event.

Elsewhere online, students are starting Facebook groups to showcase new hobbies, such as cooking and baking adventures, and flooding campus meme pages with posts that poke fun at remote learning. They are doing social-media contests — for instance, marking up digital bingo cards of challenges to complete at home. (It’s not Hanover College bingo, but it’s something.)

Emory University holds an annual Dooley’s Week each spring to honor the institution’s “unofficial skeletal mascot.” Normally, Dooley and an entourage disrupt classes. This time, the week’s events moved online. Students could, for instance, draw the skeleton on their Instagram stories, said Pamela Scully, vice provost for undergraduate affairs.

Two Yale University juniors, meanwhile, have created a virtual blind-dating platform. Their OKZoomer website purports to match students nationwide with potential partners, or at least new friends. The origin story is simple: “OKZoomer started as a Google form posted on an Ivy League meme page. We went viral, attracting close to 2,400 students at over 170 colleges and universities in only two days.” The tag line? “Love for everyone … at least six feet apart.”

At Florida A&M University, Set Friday, a market and cultural event showcasing student vendors and organizations, typically draws hundreds of students to the plaza in front of the student union each week. There, in the middle of the crowd, groups of students take turns claiming center stage with choreographed dances as a DJ spins popular music. The party goes on for hours.

In late March, after classes had moved online, the university’s athletics department hired the same DJ as usual and streamed a three-hour virtual Set Friday via Instagram Live. About 40,000 people watched the video in the first 24 hours.

Calvin Sykes, a senior, tuned in and danced at home, in Miami.

“It was definitely better than I expected,” said Sykes, who has relied on Set Friday as a time to catch up with friends and relax after a long week of classes and work. “It just reminded you of what FAMU is, what it always will be, and the traditions we have.”

‘Harder to Mingle’

Beyond student activities, some students are trying to make their homes feel a little more like the campus. The morning after Sareena Sethi, a sophomore at Emory, returned home to Ohio, she spent three hours transforming her bedroom into something closer to a dorm room.

For her entire life, it had been her place to relax. “It was never a place where I had to sit and take my macromolecules test for two hours,” she said.

Sethi carved out a workspace to help her get in a more academic mind-set. Old high-school marks of achievement and materials that cluttered her desk had to go. So did some of her décor. “Maybe I don’t need that many stuffed animals at the top of my bed,” she joked.

Sarah Abdul-Ghani, an Emory freshman, wanted to actually attend her classes at their scheduled times when she returned to her parents’ house, in Hawaii. “I wanted to see my friends,” she said. “I wanted to ask live questions instead of having to email the professor.”

She tried waking up at 4 a.m. to make it to her psychology class at 10 a.m., Atlanta time.

“I tried to outsmart my biological clock,” she said.

After a few attempts, she gave up. Now she just watches recordings of classes later in the day.

Sanika Mahajan, a junior at Harvard University, has continued much of her busy campus life from her parents’ home, in the San Francisco Bay Area. She helped organize a successful campaign to change the institution’s grading for the semester to pass/fail. She participated in a virtual panel event. She even celebrated a friend’s 21st birthday, a rite of passage for many traditional-age college students, via videoconference.

“It was a little bit harder to mingle,” Mahajan said, laughing. “But it was definitely still positive and uplifting.”

But some parts of the campus experience are impossible to replicate.

Around dusk on Mahajan’s final night on Harvard’s campus last month, she was sitting in the courtyard in front of her residence hall, listening to a friend’s a cappella group. As the sun went down, yellow lights blinked on inside the dorm, casting a soft glow over the singers. She captured the image in her mind, knowing it would be a while before she’d be there again.