It's a summer day and 11-year-old Mira Getrost is staring at a screen.
Getrost, along with a handful of other teens and pre-teens, is tasked with building a roller coaster while playing the mega-popular video game Minecraft. Their video-game selves are walking through a tall field of grass to search for the perfect spot.
There's giggling. Lots of giggling.
"I lost my roller coaster!" one long-haired girl leans over and says to Mira.
Mira's mother, Mel McGee, created this "We Can Code IT" camp to introduce teens and pre-teens to basic computer programming and software engineering concepts.
"We try to drop some engineering stuff, real world concepts in there and how it relates to what they are building in Minecraft,” said McGee.
To be sure, Minecraft isn't your average shoot-em-up game or even a strategy game. It's more difficult to pinpoint the pull of it.
But the pull is real. Nearly 20 million people have downloaded a PC or Mac version of the game, according to Mojang, the company that created the game.
Illinois-based graphic novelist Chris Ware was so taken aback by his 10-year-old daughter's interest that it was his inspiration for a recent New Yorker cover.
"It's pretty amazing how it seems to almost completely usurped the consciousness's of the 6 to 14 year old set," Ware says.
Ware's cover art is entitled “Playdate.” It has two children facing away from each other staring at screens while ignoring the real-life toys littered about them. But Ware's art isn't to signify his disapproval. Rather, his fascination.
“My daughter made all these series of underground classrooms, which I thought was such a strange idea, you know," Ware said.
The block graphics in Minecraft are by anyone's definition simplistic compared to most games and, Ware reasons, that's part of Minecraft's genius.
"So many of the video games they seem to try to imitate movies and action films and stuff, they just seem like bad illustrations to me of what a video game should be," Ware said. "This to me feels like what a video game should be; it has its own particle physics to it based on the idea of this block."
As parents, like Ware, debate how Minecraft may be different than other games and less mindless than television, there is another national conversation happening.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has long recommendedthat kids limit non-school related screen time to "less than one or two hours per day." And there shouldn't be any screen time for kids under two.
But a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics that explored the effects of parental monitoring on children's media use also noted that nearly 75% of pediatricians feel some sense of futility in making the AAP's screen time recommendations to parents. After all, more than half the kids in the U.S. are in front of screens for much more than the recommended limit.
Carolyn Ivers-Landis is a pediatric psychologist at University Hospitals and mother of a Minecraft player. She says the academy has been struggling to figure out how to make these recommendations more realistic.
"There's been some recent research showing that if parents do monitor the amount of time their kid is spending playing on video games, if they also maybe co-play with their child, and if they also monitor the content in terms of more aggressive it is, that might help give you a little wiggle room so you might be able to let your child do more than two hours a day," Landis said.
Meanwhile, back at the camp, behind McGee is a giant screen displaying a Minecraft game in action. A handful of teens and pre-teens gaze over their individual computers at the green landscape on the big screen.
Mira Getrost's roller coaster is causing a stir. Pull a lever and it can set pigs free or turn them into bacon. Her mother uses this as a teaching moment and asks Mira to explain it to the class.
So, the brown-eyed girl steps to the mic and tries not to giggle...
"You have to have like an intersection, so you have to have one here and one here. And one goes to pig and one goes to bacon. So in the pig one you just put bunch of lava to kill the pig…"
The kids' engagement is real and they're eager to learn. So while hours of screen time is still a bad idea for anyone, maybe spending part of a hot summer day playing Minecraft isn't such a bad thing.