We have finished our MinecraftEdu buildings for Lionfish City and made some awesome screencasts to show all of our hard work. We had seven teams who built seven different buildings all with their own unique designs.
 
Mr. Hewes gave each team a plot of land and laid the foundations for our buildings, from there we had to build the rest of the buildings and include the things that we said we would need in our plans. These are some of the design features that we included:

The shops needed big windows and signs.
The house needed a triangular roof.
The school needed a playground. 
The hospital needed a car park and helipad.
The post office needed letterboxes.
The offices needed spaces for tables, chairs and computers.

Some of the buildings like the school, office and hospital are really big and Mr. Hewes had to help us with the design process. For this, he placed a row of windows on each wall for us to copy when building the walls to make sure they were all uniform.

The other tricky design that Mr. Hewes started for us to copy was the roads, which are seven blocks wide, with white wool lane markers in the middle. It was the special job of some of the builders to go around and complete the streets in the correct pattern after they had finished their buildings. 

The helipad was really hard to figure out, so Mr. Hewes put that onto the roof of Lionfish City Hospital for The Rainbow Stars once they had finished. 

It was a really cool project and we all learned some excellent skills in collaboration as we all shared our individual strengths to help everybody get their job done.

You can see our screencasts embedded below!

We hope you enjoyed our videos. Thanks for watching!

Recently we sent our Minecraft building plans to our friends over at HWPS. It was a good chance for us to revise some of the things we've been learning and practise our writing and speaking skills. 

65 Midnight, as our buddies are known, are also building away and have given us some information about what they are doing. You can see their video below. We are so lucky to be collaborating with kids from other schools and learning similar things. 

Go 65 Midnight! 

Last week we finished our building proposals and made our videos for HWPS. Below you can see our video with all of our building designs. We can't wait to start building them and making our Minecraft movies. We hope you like our video and look forward to the helpful feedback from HWPS! 

The Purple Spiders' blog post is here!

Below you can see some photos of our proposed designs. They are also in the video.

Above is the driving question and project outline for this term's project-based learning. We are learning all about places and spaces and how the different purposes of different buildings affect their designs. 
We have been for a walk around Merrylands to look all at all the different buildings and their design features and we have decided in our teams which building we would like to build using the sandbox video game, Minecraft. One of our proposed building designs is below.

As part of the project, we have to send these pictures, along with our proposed design features to stage 3 kids from Homebush West Public School, who will give us feedback and some suggested changes. In a way, they are acting as our City Council.
Most of us have decided to make a video presentation for HWPS with our team, but one group, The Purple Spiders, have decided to blog their proposal instead. They have decided to make a post office and the design feature which makes post offices different from other buildings can be seen in the diagram labelled 'Front' in the picture above. Post offices need a lot of little letter boxes so that people can collect their letters. 

Here is The Purple Spiders' blog post! 

We have also made a video introduction for HWPS and uploaded it to our YouTube channel. On Monday we will be uploading a new video with the rest of our building proposals for HWPS, along with our proposed building diagrams. In the meantime, you can see our introductory video embedded below. Thanks for watching!