Sunday, April 10, 2011
Building Models - Plate Boundaries
I recently had my small group of students in a science investigations elective research and build plate boundary models. The goal of the activity was to have students use clay (or other materials if they wished) to create a representation of not only the movement of the plates but also the outcome on Earth's surface. Luckily having this extra class I could devote four class periods to the project. The part my students enjoyed the most was the modeling stages. Using clay was a huge motivator for them. Where they struggled was in the planning stages and the determination of how the actually create a three-dimensional model from an image online. There were many on-the-spot alterations needed as students realized that their original design needed to be changed to fit the limitations of their materials.
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Amanda,
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the student struggling, do you think that it would have been helpful to add additional materials for the models or to have more preplanning prior to creating the model? Or perhaps the struggle on the part of the students was just part of the natural process that comes along with building a model? Amy
Amy,
ReplyDeleteI believe it was a little bit of both. The overarching difficulty could also have been caused by this group of students having little experience with model building.