Our Sessions at the Butler Centre – community work

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.