Prior to beginning our second week of the Futurists' Fair project, I wanted to link this work to the professional development I participated in at STEM X Academy with CSIRO future scenarios. As a whole class group, the Year 5/6s looked at a few short videos produced by CSIRO and then unpacked some information from CSIRO's report, Australia 2030: Navigating our uncertain future. This report details a scenarios-based outlook for Australia's future.
I then used the future scenarios as prompts for small group discussions, and this helped to tune students into the “bigger picture” of problems we
face now and in the future at a local and more global level. The main scenario students looked at was about 'Planetary Pushback' and the impact that humans are having on the environment. Some students had expressed interest in invasive species, so they looked at environmental impacts. Students had some very deep and interesting discussions, I loved being a fly on the wall! The future scenario work was a really effective way to tap into the problems that concern my students, the big
questions and worries that they have about their future world and how they
would solve those issues.
For the second stage of our Futurists' Fair work, I made a quick "flipped classroom" video using the student app Seesaw to set the stage. I wanted students to choose just one idea that they felt passionate about and come up with a quick persuasive presentation to convince others to vote for their idea. To save time, I borrowed some animation clips from CSIRO's Australian National Outlook video for my background:
Students were able to decide whether they would prefer to work alone or in a small group for this component of the project. We used post-it notes to list what they were most passionate about and would like to work on. This process helped students to form groups with people that had the same 'big ideas'. We noticed that most ideas fit into four main categories: Poverty/homelessness, Endangered Species, Human impact on pollution and climate change and Invasive species.
All of my students ended up finding someone that had a similar idea and got to work researching their problem. Things didn't quite go to plan! My students were so invested in their research and persuasive presentations that I allowed them to keep going for two whole lessons (rather than the initial 30 minutes I had planned for!). When students are intrinsically motivated and engaged in their learning, I think it's really important to allow them that extra time for them to go deeper with the learning... so week 2 turned into week 3!
Students presented their ideas for the problem they would like to solve for the Futurists' Fair. We had two teachers and the rest of the class acting as a "shark tank panel" to provide feedback on their presentation skills. Students then voted for two ideas (their own and one other!). They tallied up the results and found that pollution scraped in as the winner by 3 points! A small group of students then worked on creating a video for our class to present at the Futurists' Fair.
