Our 8th grade students are working on classification skills in Science. This year, as in the previous school year, we took them into our ABC El Salvador 2 region of Jokaydia Grid for some practical work. This section of the region is called ABC Pandora, inspiration for which came from the movie Avatar, and yes, we even have a huge tree of souls!
The Science teachers prepared their annotation resources in Google Drive and shared them with the students while we prepped the region. This time around we built a new 2 story lab with the classification grid embedded in the floors. Each teaching group was then assigned a floor.
We needed a few examples of algae and moss so we added these as well and ensured that certain copies of plants were copyable by the students. The idea was that they would search out examples of the plants they needed to classify, take copies and then place copies in the appropriate sections of the grid.
We added one other element, eyeballs and flying fish which were scripted to follow the students around on the grid. Of course when I demo it to the kids I am covered in flying eyeballs and fish as I am the only one in there. As they kids get in however, that soon changes and the eyeballs and fish begin sticking to them. It is a bit silly, but what would Pandora be without an element of slightly annoying native creatures and objects.
The kids are very experienced in working in Jokaydia Grid since they built their environmentally themed park last school year. They didn't need a long tutorial or explanation, just a reminder on how to set up the grid on a different machine.
Finally they were given their users and passwords and in we went. Things became quite electric for a while as the activity intensified. What really stands out here is that the kids had a
blast doing this and learned so much at the same time.
Here is a short video we managed to capture during the final session.
We hope you enjoy it!
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