Digging Down: Envisaging what might be – Geography, Year 8

Overview

This year 8 Geography project required pupils to make web pages exploring the effects that the movement of shifting tectonic plates has on the Earth in terms of volcanoes and earthquakes. Pupils, working in groups, were asked to create web pages of text, diagrams and animations of plate movements and consider where in the world they would have an effect and explain why.

Pupil Learning Objectives

· To learn about tectonic processes, plate movements, earthquakes, volcanoes
· To consider the detail of these processes by animating them
· To work in collaborative groups
· To develop a website including images and text

Project description

This project has been repeated with five separate year 8 classes. They all took place during lesson time in school and over two days at Highwire. This description details the work of the first class to do the project. The class of thirty were split into groups of 4 and 5 to work on different Earth movements (constructive and destructive plate margins, faults, compression, mountain creation, volcanic islands and so on). They were asked to find out how the movements looked and to consider where in the world they happened and what the effects were. The brief was to animate the processes, and describe the effects in words and diagrams. Pupils were given some written materials and images and found information on the areas of the world on the Internet. The animations were particularly useful because the pupils were showing Earth movements that had happened over long periods of time, so could not be seen until it ended as an earthquake or volcanic eruption. Pupils were therefore asked to be imaginative. The first class had not seen animations of these processes, subsequent classes were not shown the animations during class time, but may have viewed them while browsing through the Highwire website. The groups were allowed to choose which parts of their pages they wanted to work on. During class time pupils did the majority of the research for the animations and were asked to sketch out sequences of images. These were brought to Highwire. Some pupils chose to draw the images on paper and scan them in, others drew straight onto the computer. They animated them using animation software and used web-authoring software to design and create their website. During the time at Highwire they were able to find more specific information by searching on the Internet.

Creative thinking and behaviour: Representing Ideas

Pupils were being asked to animate invisible processes. This was something that they needed to think up in their heads from still images and textual descriptions of fairly abstract ideas. Their representations served to make the abstract concrete, but the nature of a program that automatically animates your work means that there is a constant engagement with the information. Pupils watched their animations, and could then see where it did not seem accurate and change it. This reflective and iterative process generated discussion and forced pupils to check back for specific details. The point of making animations, diagrams and text for the web also meant that the audience for the published work was important. The audience they were making it for was other pupils in their school. This was a very well known audience which carried with it a sense of having to look cool and smart and entertaining. The input of character to engage their audience made the pupils relate personally to the processes they were communicating. It also meant that while they were viewing their animations, they were motivated by aesthetics and humour as well as by geographical facts. The combination of information and character gave a strong sense of ownership, satisfaction from watching their classmates play their animation, and a strong sense of satisfaction.

The school that began this project used one year 8 class as a pilot. The teachers felt that this had been the most successful way of delivering this subject in its combination of creativity and curriculum information. They felt that they gained the knowledge more successfully from the hands-on constructivist approach. The humanities department therefore put this project as a part of their scheme of work for every class in this year group.

Key features of ICT that enabled and supported pupils’ creativity

Provisionality – This was key to this project. The ability to change during a process of creation stopped the pupils from being slapdash and encouraged them to make the factual information as accurate as possible.

Multimodality – The project, although focused on animation was only a part of their web pages that included text and images. Pupils needed to be clear about when a labelled diagram was more useful than text or an animation. This decision would be based on the best way to communicate. So animation would work well for a dynamic process, but to explain that process text or sound may be more effective. As language for the processes came up many times, labelled diagrams were seemingly the most appropriate form for this.

Quality - From sketched sequences to more involved artwork to scanned images, the computer-generated animations were transformed into a professional looking product. This led to an increased motivation in getting it looking right, and so again, a greater accuracy in their formulation of their work.