Why DO Kids Want to Play Minecraft?
Sitting back, ready for another interesting and rather aggressive night on COD (Call of Duty), I launch my dashboard to see the usual suspects all gathered playing the latest shoot ’em ups.
Except one. Looking again, I notice my 13-year-old brother Jimbob is playing a game I’ve never seen – MINECRAFT.
After much persuasion and explanation “COME ON BRO, BUY IT PLEASE, YOU BUILD STUFF”, I decide to purchase it, in order to support him in our mum’s campaign to play online more responsibly.
The game launches and all I see is blocks. Have I got the right game? Where are the graphics?
Wandering mindlessly around, past trees, rivers and spiders, until Harvey Jimbob asks me to come to his house. Here’s the strangest part: he built it.
A Homemade School
Dr Lesley Beeton visited South Africa and visited a school to find out what it’s like to go to school in South Africa.
This is the Drakensberg in South Africa. In English, it means ‘Dragon Mountain’. The children in this part of South Africa face a daily commute to school. In the area where I was staying, the nearest town was Bergville. With the windy roads through the mountains, this journey can take almost an hour. School starts early too, at eight o’clock, so that means getting up around 6 am to be ready for the taxi.
What is The Point in Learning … History
Have you ever sat in a Maths class wondering if you will ever have to do long division without a calculator once you leave school? Or silently cursed your Geography teacher while learning about the formation of oxbow lakes?
And History? That’s all in the past and irrelevant, isn’t it? In this series of articles, we will look at some of the subjects we learn at school, and try and answer the question: What’s the point in learning this?
Last time we looked at uses of Physics, both in day to day life, and in careers. Today we will focus on History – the study of the past and how our society came to be as it is. Here are some ways in which studying History is useful to us:
Critical Thinking

Thinking by Elisabeth Haslam
When we study history we don’t just learn lists of facts and dates off by heart. We read lots of opinions about what happened and why, and come to our own conclusion. We base these opinions on two types of material, primary sources which are texts and drawings created at the time of the history we are studying, and secondary sources which were written after the event.
How to Eat Healthily With Food Allergies
Writer and blogger Kate Thompson has four children. Kitty and Archie are eight years old. Along with their older brothers (aged 12 and 16) they suffer from food allergies, in their case “gut allergies” called non IgE allergies which you can’t test for.
The more well known allergies are IgE allergies – these are the ones which bring an instant reaction – sometimes this reaction can be very dangerous, and the person cannot breathe properly.
Cat’s Bats
Cat is 10 years old and has recently moved back from living abroad. She is settling into school in UK and learning to read and write in English (until now she was schooled in French, so it is a bit of a change). Her favourite animals are bats, and here she tells us a bit about them.









