In a bid to maintain traditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Santo Tomas (UST) will be conducting a virtual campus tour in its own Minecraft server for around 12,000 freshmen students on Friday.
The 21.5-hectare UST campus was reconstructed by a team of around 80 students in Minecraft, a video game where players can build and explore things made by other players.
There will be a synchronous streaming of the UST Minecraft Launch and Tour on the UST Tiger TV Facebook page at 3 p.m. It will also be streamed on August 29 and 30, and September 5 and 6.
Representatives of the different faculties, colleges, and institutes in the university will introduce the various areas in the campus during the virtual tour.
The virtual tour will be done in replacement of the traditional Thomasian Welcome Walk, an 18-year-old tradition where freshmen students snake their way through the campus before entering the historic Arch of the Centuries, that signifies the start of their Thomasian journey.
Charles Nobleza, a UST Institute of Information and Computing Sciences (IICS) student and creator of UST Minecraft, said he felt sad after seeing that all freshmen week activities will be conducted online.
He set to work on recreating the university's Main Building, Benavides Park, and Arch of the Centuries on Minecraft. His works went viral after he posted them on Twitter.
Nobleza said UST is the first Philippine university to be recreated in Minecraft.
"This will be our temporary home amidst the pandemic," he said in an interview with UST Tiger TV.
"We already envisioned it as a friendly and wholesome server environment for all Thomasians," he added.