Sylwia Korsak

After our social catch up this morning we took a bucket of flowers and gave those away to all mums in the Market Square. So here it is – a bucket of over 50 smiles from this morning. It was so much fun!

This is not an update on our Spring Competition – we have asked our video makers to give it a go and start working on the Minecraft version of Betjeman Park in Wantage. Here are the results of their work in class:

Our coding group learned about Mozilla Open Badges and the idea of skills (we use badges in our club too, but we wanted to ensure that children understand the idea of skills collected to be featured in their future, for example on a CV). We have designed our own badges on paper and later in Minecraft.

Video group learned basics of video editing in iMovie.

German group learned and worked on farming in Minecraft.

In our maths group we have challenged our children to design pieces of architecture representing basic 3D shapes – pyramids and sphere-shaped tree house seemed to be their favourites.

…resulted in amazing ideas for the tile of our Mother’s Day video (but we won’t share those just yet;)). We have also worked on ideas for the statue of King Alfred:

This week we have been invited by Sally, one of our mums, to present about our club and safe Internet practice on our local. Listen to the recording below or here:

The Hendred Chatters 3rd March 2015 by Online Radio Broadcasting on Mixcloud

We are very happy to announce that the Wildwood Kitchen in Wantage agreed to be our sponsor – THANK YOU!. We will be able to use their new cinema facilities to showcase the work of our creative, video making team but also ideas from all children.

We cannot wait!

In the meantime we have asked our children to design the restaurant in Minecraft – here are few examples of their work:

Last Saturday was very productive and a lot of fun again. Our coding group played with LEGO Mindstorms and learned about a different take on coding.

Our video makers put into practice their new interviewing skills and recorded few additional pieces for the final video.

Our German group learned about crafting and colours.

All groups worked on Wantage themes – Market Square and the Statue of King Alfred.

We have mentioned this part of our activities in our brochure but here we would like to explain in more detail our work for our local community. Within the framework of our provided courses we have offered Butler Centre an hour each week of our time for free to work with Year 6 children. They are usually quite engaged in all other activities but this way we can channel their creativity into Minecraft and so for the last few weeks we have been working with them on various challenges related to our four tracks: coding, video making, German and maths but also local knowledge underlying all our work.

In our video making sessions children contributed to the amazing list of interview questions for our Mother’s Day video and learned the best practices of interviewing and filming studio design.

When we moved on to coding we have talked about coding apps, general history of computers and Raspberry Pi and as a challenge designed their very own computers in the game:

During our maths session all Year 6 pupils worked for 1,5hrs on calculations on paper handouts (for fun! they really enjoyed it!) while some of their peers designed homes with specific dimensions to put maths into practice:

In our last session, we had more time for Minecraft building so I have asked our Butler Centre group to design their very own version of Wantage Market Square with the statue of King Alfred the Great.

Some took more creative approach, others decided to reconstruct the exact look of the statue – for which they might need a little bit more time (the challenge here was to move from one device to another so they had to work on a laptop, iPhone and iPad):

To sum it up I can say just two things. First of all – children are immensely creative and daring in their take on reality, they think outside of the box and build magnificent structures with just a few blocks. Secondly – learning with Minecraft is engaging, it is fun and it is very, very effective.

I am really happy that we have the opportunity to give back a few our skills and passion to our local community.

Considering it’s half-term in Wantage we have collected few links and other recourses to help our Spring Competition participants in their work.

Betjeman Park:

1. I have spent all morning in the Betjeman Park today taking photos of it and uploading them to Panoramio – Google Maps based photo repository. You can find all those images here.
2. You can find a good map of the park over on its official website here.

Harry Potter:

1. We have found plenty of images on Google, so do check it our or look for your chosen location or item there, just make sure you check the images tab in results.
2. If you are more ambitious Wikipedia has a great write-up on all locations where the series was filmed.

There is a lot of work done in Minecraft with Harry Potter elements already, there are even a map and a mod, but be careful – we will judge all the entries based on their originality, creativity, and effort so working with the map is not going to be considered.

Good luck everyone! We cannot wait to see your work!