Jacob Woolcock – Page 8 – Penpol Primary School

Constructing Egyptian Pyramids in Minecraft

8th December 20228th December 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

This half term we’ve been building Pyramids in Minecraft Edu in our Computing lessons. Mr Woolcock and Paul have created a shared world where we were all able to work together and build pyramids for our Egyptian Pharaohs. We researched what would be inside a pyramid and learnt about the traps and secret rooms designed to stop thieves and included these in our designs. We even created secret chambers full of canopic jars, golden treasures and scrolls of knowledge for the mummies to take with them into the afterlife.

Welcome to our Pyramids!

00:00

Here are some more photos of all of our pyramids, along with some extra information about each one.

Class 7

Xander, George and Maverick

This is a maze which is to trick the people that try and break in and take all the gold. There are pressure plates on the floor and when you step on one they open up a trap door and you fall down! At the centre of the maze there is lots of treasure which was buried with the god Osiris.

Sorrel, luna and noah

Our pyramid is for Thoth. We made a patten in the wall which was meant to be a hieroglyphic. We’ve added lots of gold and treasures inside our pyramid along with a red carpet which feels very royal. We put some chests in there too with lots of important things in them like precious gems and golden objects.

Koby, Lili, Daisy, Xanthe, Lowenna and Frankie

We’ve built secret tunnels under the pyramid so if people try to get in they’ll come straight out the other side! There are some other traps too that are supposed to catch people trying to break in.

Lexi, Alice and Alice

We put two chambers into our pyramid one is full of treasures and is where the sarcophagus is placed. The pharaoh would have been buried with all of their treasure. There are secret tunnels to get into the chambers to stop anyone naughty coming in. It’s designed to be really scary in the tunnels!

Bobby, Daisy and Casey

This is where the mummy would be placed in the pyramid. We have put gold inside for him so he can take it with him to the afterlife. We put torches inside so it’s not completely dark and so he can see the gold in the afterlife.

Fred, Poppy, Charlie and Darcey

We’ve got a staircase inside the pyramid which takes you up to a large maze where people might think the treasure chests are hidden, but it’s a trap! They’re actually hidden under the pyramid. This traps thieves inside the pyramid. We’re really proud of the fact it has two levels and the fact we’ve added ancient books to give the pharaoh lots of knowledge in the afterlife.

Edwin, Logan and Arthur

It was designed so explorers who come in through the entrance will fall into a trap. There’s an empty chest filled with really rubbish items which will trap the robbers into a chamber. We’ve made it really confusing so nobody can get into steal the mummy or the treasure! It’s full of traps and surprises!

Class 8

Grace, Izzy, Merryn and amelia

This is a hidden part of our pyramid where there’s lots of gold and things inside. There are false lights in a fake corridor to distract people trying to break in! The gold is hidden in a secret place behind a trap.

Rory, Darcey, Noah and Charlie

We made an upstairs in the pyramid, but didn’t quite finish it off yet. But there’s also a dungeon room below the main room where there are spider webs, creepy things and stuff like that. Our pharaoh was the god of the underworld so we made his dungeon look like the underworld.

Massimo and Jack

We really enjoyed making the pyramid! We thought “what would an ancient Egyptian think about when the pyramids was created?” We thought the answer would be glory, cool secret stuff and valuable treasure. On the top of our building there’s loads of gold and I made the Egyptian symbol of life out of gold! We also really enjoyed making the secret entrances behind the hieroglyphics.

Maddison, Nevaeh and Lucy

I liked creating the portals for each Egyptian God because I could figure out blocks would best show off the different gods. We also really liked making the secret rooms which were so important in the pyramids to store things safely for the afterlife.

Zak, Pearl, Isaiah and Ethan

The trap in our pyramid has a little hole in the middle of it, so if anyone is silly enough to walk in the middle they’ll fall through! Our little room is really important because you can only fit really special things inside it. There is a secret treasure chest hiding under our bridge!

Sam and Logan

When you first go in through the passageway there’s a real sense of Ra’s power. We used glowstone to represent the sun. I liked the front of our pyramid a lot because it’s so three dimensional and it looks absolutely massive – but still smaller than a real pyramid!

Noah, Dexter, Bailey and Koen

The room in the back corner is a secret space where we’ve hidden some gold treasure. Another room has other important things in it like a backdoor, a desk and lots of ancient Egyptian scrolls. We’ve also added some exploding traps to stop anyone coming in!

Evie, Freya, Alayah and Everly

In this room the Egyptians could practice their mummifications! They need to be perfect so that people they were mummifying could get into the underworld. We also put in a trap door in the so we can get down into the secret room where the mummification happens.

Exploring Energy and Innovating Ideas

29th November 202224th November 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

Today our Year 5 and Year 6 LEGO League teams were fortunate enough to have not one but two very special guests around to help mentor and support them with their competition preparation.

Our team mentor, Chelsea from RNAS Culdrose, has kindly agreed to visit every Thursday to help coach both teams. She’s a familiar face at Penpol now having worked closely with our teams last year as well – in fact she asked if she could come back this year!

Alongside Chelsea we also had another very special visitor – somebody who has travelled slightly further than Culdrose to join us…

Alejandro Buitrago is an engineering student from the University of Technology and Engineering Careers (UTEC) in Lima, Peru. He is currently travelling around Europe and through a happy coincidence ran into Mr Woolcock. Upon chatting, Mr Woolcock discovered that Alejandro is in the middle of a degree in Renewable Energy Engineering – which just so happens to be the exact theme for this years LEGO League competition!

Alejandro very kindly agreed to spend an afternoon with us and spent time working with our Year 6’s over lunchtime and our Year 5’s this afternoon.

During this time Alejandro kindly answered questions, shared a wealth of knowledge and inspired the children to pursue and develop their innovative ideas for the Innovation Project. By the end of the day the library was covered in hand-drawn sketches, coloured paper, glue sticks, cardboard boxes turned into prototypes and assorted LEGO constructions. All the signs of a good afternoon!

A massive thanks to both Chelsea and Alejandro for their support.

Year 6 Photos

Year 5 Photos

Fantastic Fireworks in Year 1

29th November 20224th November 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

This week Year 1 have been learning all about fireworks by writing poetry and creating digital art.

The children started on Tuesday by getting used to drawing on the iPads with the Logitech Crayons. They used Keynote to draw some colourful, bright fireworks using lots of small mark making around a central point.

These fireworks were then all put together into one large image (with the help of our Year 6’s!) to create the lovely animation you can see above.

In their English lessons the children were learning about verbs to describe movement and the -ing and -ed suffixes. They considered which of these words would best describe fireworks and then used them to help with their pattern poetry.

You can see their wonderful verbs and poems by clicking on the pictures below.

Keeping Your Child Safe Online – A Checklist for Parents and Carers from CEOP

20th October 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

parentsandcarerschecklist

Behind the Scenes of Maths Mania in Scratch

29th November 202211th October 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

Scratch is a great program that lets us build our own games, animations and tools. Using brightly coloured blocks of code we can control individual objects (called Sprites) as well as being able to combine multiple elements into more complex programs. However my favourite thing about Scratch is that you can make just about anything you like if you use your imagination.

That’s exactly what happened last week when I heard this…

“Mr Woolcock, can I show you this game I’ve been making at home?”

Below is a video of that particular game, complete with play-by-play commentary!

I can’t overstate how much creativity, problem solving and complex logical thinking are involved in bringing a project like this to life – it’s absolutely ace.

If you’d like to have a play of this game (or the prequel – Grammar Castle) you can use the buttons below.

Coding Underwater Adventure Games in Scratch

20th July 202220th July 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

Our Year 5 students have been exploring Scratch this term and learning lots about coding along the way. From small beginnings, the children have quickly developed a really exciting and creative understanding of just what’s possible in Scratch.

This learning has all come together in the last few weeks with a massive game building project, based on their class topic of a ‘Conservation Conversation‘. This project started out as a simple ‘falling objects’ type game where they were trying to collect pollution before it hit the bottom of the ocean. However this quickly developed into something far more interesting thanks to some incredible ideas from the children. First they wanted to make the game more random, with objects falling at different times in different places. Then several of them explored the idea of ‘power ups’ that would make the game easier or harder. The natural next step was to add a variable to hold a Score and after that we decided it would be fun to add a time limit variable to add to the pressure!

But they didn’t stop there – the children then developed even more elements in their games. Time limited boosters, sneaky tricks to get extra points, objects that immediately ended the game when caught. The list was endless!

Finally we all came together and explored how a micro:bit could be used as a game controller for these games. We used buttons as an input, before Rio came up with some quite brilliant code to use the motion sensor too!

This has been a hugely fun project and the children have been problem solving, debugging and creating new code with incredible skill and precision. They’ve even got into the habit of labelling their code as they go to make it easy to pick up and edit in the future!

Below you can see some of the code they’ve been constructing, as well as some of their games for you to play and enjoy!

For this game you need to use the Arrow Keys to move the paddle along the bottom of the screen.

Catch the pollution but beware of bad power-ups!

Press the Green Flag to start.

"It was really fun, I loved making the games with Mr Woolcock. It was hard work, but fun because we kept adding more to make our games more fun. There was a time when we tried to get the micro:bits to move and I just couldn’t get the right pieces of code to make it move properly, when I figured it out I was so excited that I just kept playing the game for ages!"

Oliver

"It was fun with the micro:bits because it was so cool watching it come to life and play the game with our own controllers. I also liked testing each others games out on Scratch because it was a great way to get more ideas for our own games."

Imogen

Cool Code in these Games

"I’ve really enjoyed this project, it was challenging but it was totally worth it. Trying to figure out where the bugs in my game were was tricky, but eventually I figured it out by using trial and error which helped because it showed me that my timer wasn’t working properly. When I fixed that the game was perfect!"

Maisie

"My favourite thing was exploring the new blocks which I haven’t used before in Scratch, like the micro:bit blocks to control the game. I made lots of choices in my game to make it fun, including where things would go and how quickly they moved!"

Tacita

"My favourite part of making our games was designing the code - especially working with the variables like the timer and the score. These parts make the game a lot more fun because they make it really competitive to play - they were challenging to get working but my friend was able how to make it work a little better."

Lylie

For this game you need to use the Arrow Keys to move the paddle along the bottom of the screen.

Catch the pollution but beware of bad power-ups!

Press the Green Flag to start.

"It was amazing because you got to make a game and play it at school! It was challenging because sometimes getting the right code was tricky, but what I did was (when I calmed down!) I had another look for the blocks I needed and I always managed to find it in the end."

Alex

"My favourite bit of the project was doing the challenges in the code where Mr Woolcock would give us a starting point and it was up to us to make the game elements work."

Caitlyn

Year 4 create their own Map of Africa

19th July 202213th July 2022 by Jacob Woolcock

This half term our Year 4’s have been studying ‘Which Way to Africa?’ as their topic. Part of this exciting learning has involved creating Digital Art on the iPads.

The children started learning all about the the tools available in our chosen drawing app (Sketches School) and then began to research an individual country in Africa. We learnt about each country including landmarks, food, art, culture and geographic features. The children then used this information to inspire them in their digital artwork.

"When I was doing my work I Googled a picture of what my country looks like and it was a burst of colour. This inspired me to add lots and lots of colours to my picture. I also searched for patterns from my country which I used in my drawing as well."

Sophia (C9)

South Africa

Map 1
Map 2

"This was an amazing project to work on and I wish I could do it over and over again with different countries! I learnt that Angola has amazing famous sculptures and building and many famous birds and beautiful patterns. I think that the map itself looks amazing now it's all put together!"

Faith (C9)

Angola

To aide their artwork, each child created a ‘mood board’ of imagery from their chosen country. We then used Adobe Colour on the iPads to extract the key colours from the images. This meant each child had a custom palette of colours for their country – helping them all stand out and look unique.

"When Mr Woolcock first sent me my country I felt a bit nervous because I didn't know much about my country or what I could fit into the map, but at the end it turned out to be something that I'm really proud of. My favourite part of the picture was doing the bubble writing, I really like doing the writing on the iPads!"

Violet (C9)

Malawi

Finally the children bought everything together to fill in the outline of their country with themed text, imagery, the countries flag and other graphical elements which they felt best represented their chosen country.

As well as combining these into the map above, you can also explore each individual country below.