One of the ongoing challenges for teachers today is to not only teach technology operations and skill but also to embrace and integrate its uses in learning. This term, Year 3 students designed a space journey for three Lego Astronauts with a mission of exploring two learning goals; how the earth orbits around the sun and how day and night occurs.
So far students have integrated technology in the testing phase of our unit, looking at how sunlight (using a torch) casts a shadow behind the earth, to make the night. Using this evidence, students mapped a space journey to show it on a larger scale. To do this we took a drone, complete with three Lego men securely fastened, to our scaled model of space on the oval. Students positioned the earth globe and the sun strategically then commenced the ascend with a countdown and “blast off”! Students watched as the Lego men journeyed around the sun and then the earth globe.
The next step in our learning will see students use iMovie and iPads to add their own narration over the recorded video from the drone flight. The aim of this mini-documentary is for each student to verbalise their understanding of the learning goals as part of their science assessment for the term. We are excited to see the final product of this project in the coming weeks.
