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When it comes to screen time, there are two activities where we give our daughters a lot of latitude: coding and Minecraft.

This morning I published a post on Medium called "Gardening at Night: One Dad's Guide to Minecraft." It's something I've been noodling on for a while, inspired by my daughters and by a few other parents who wanted to know how our family got started with the game.

Please let me know if it's useful to you or anyone else you know!

Separately, I've been collaborating with Jodi Jefferson to create a meetup geared for girls who play Minecraft called Girls Who Mine. We've met a couple of times, and are making it public with an event we're crafting for January. If you're interested, and live in the New York City area, jump over and add your name to the mailing list. We'll keep you posted.

To play Minecraft for real, we needed a new computer. So we decided to build one.

It should take a week or two. And with any luck, it'll cost less than $300.

For several months now, my daughters -- ages 8 and 10 -- have wanted to play the computer version of Minecraft. The computer version is far superior to the pocket version they've been playing, which, among other things, has no wolves, horses or dragons.

Buying a whole computer just to play the game didn't seem, well, appropriate. But making one? That we could do. 

So we're on our way. And I'll update this post en route to document our progress.

Episode One: The parts

Poking around the internet, I found the hardware requirements for Minecraft. A little more fishing landed this Lifehacker article about making your own PC. It included links to an entire computer-building lesson series and PC Part Picker, a service that helps you buy your parts and ensure they're compatible. 

Here's our parts list. It's based on the original Lifehacker article, minus the optical drive (we won't need it) and plus a wifi card (we will need that). We also upgraded the processor just a tad.

The first component to arrive, symbolically, was the shell into which we'll put the rest of the parts -- once they show up!

All the parts have finally arrived! Let the building begin.