FOR TEACHERS

 TIPS FOR USING SCIENCE 3D

• Use missions before covering the material you want to highlight

  • This provides a reference for reinforcing lessons as you do them.

  • It allows students to discover patterns and processes for themselves, which enhances retention.

• Be flexible in using the missions

  • Each mission is relevant to many areas of inquiry. You may find connections where the content fits across the curriculum.

  • Activities are meant to be stand-alone but can be the basis for differentiated instruction. Use the answer keys to provide help to students who struggle or to have advanced students expand on the lesson or help their peers.

• Encourage students to talk

  • Have students come up with ideas and hypotheses that can be tested. It doesn’t matter if the hypothesis is supported or rejected. What matters is that it is testable.

  • Dream up ways to test hypotheses (no matter how realistic or expensive).

• Facilitate teamwork

  • Science 3D missions can be completed alone but working together is encouraged. Allowing students to collaborate or work in small groups simulates scientific processes and facilitates learning. Consider using video conferencing solutions (e.g. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype) to facilitate group work remotely.

  • Play the Mission Video multiple times. Students may see different things in multiple viewings.

• Use the missions to reinforce past concepts

  • Most science curriculum concepts are taught once, and students don’t have them reinforced.  Seeing and using information multiple times helps to retain the information. Students will perform better at the end of the year (including on standardized tests) and remember information if all the missions in a grade or course are used. While each mission has unique material and a different focal area in the curriculum, there is overlap that will help reinforce information.

• Explore more

  • Have students identify what they want to learn more about and how to do it.

  • Link back to missions throughout the year.

  • Have students think about how to apply what they have done to local environments and/or situations.

  • Challenge students to use what they have learned to make predictions.

Mission Order

Each Mission is built to replicate the scientific method. Start a mission with the Mission Briefing Video. Then have students complete the My Inquiries page, where they will come up with their own questions about the mission. This can be followed by a teacher-led PowerPoint mission briefing (located in the ‘Resources’ dropdown menu) or preferably, by having students move on to the Mission Reader. If you choose not to use the Mission Reader and Mission Research activity, you can use the PowerPoint to provide an introduction before launching the Mission Video. 

If you are going to use the PowerPoint mission briefing, be sure to customize the “YOUR WORK” slide to let students know which components of the Mission they will be completing, and the proper order students should follow. 

Before assigning students to read the Mission Reader, you can give them active learning assignments. For example, you might ask them to write down words that they are not familiar with that they can look up later (most are probably defined in the text or in the glossary). Have students keep notes on things that they find interesting or strange. You might consider asking students to take notes or make drawings in their Mission Packs based on content in the Mission Reader and videos.

Note: The Mission Readers are all written to be engaging and at an average reading level for grades 3, 4 and 5. Because different schools present science material in different orders in middle school, the Mission Readers for all middle school missions are leveled to a 6th grade reading level. Lexile scores are provided for each reader.

The Mission Reader provides an interesting and engaging entry to the background information students need to understand the mission’s phenomenon. It also presents information that is specific to particular standards related to the mission that aren’t covered in the Mission Video. For example, the Mission Reader for the middle school mission, The Real Black Panther, provides information on genetics, Punnett squares, and artificial selection. It also tells the story of a leopard with melanism in the Kabini Forest of India. In the Masters of the Deep: Sperm Whales Mission Reader for elementary school, students learn not just about these amazing marine mammals, but about light waves and sound waves. These pieces are built to provide an anchor for later work that becomes part of the mission and reinforces or sets up other investigations that you might do in your class. For example, students can imagine a sperm whale navigating the depths when they are doing hands-on activities with light or sound.

Narrated versions of the readers will be added online to assist students that struggle with the content.

Once students have finished the Mission Reader, they are ready for the Mission Research activity. Be sure to look at the answer key before giving this assignment. Numerous additional activities and questions are available to build communication, writing, or active learning skills. Most of the Mission Research activities are geared for students to test and apply the knowledge that they gained in the Mission Reader, and to prepare them for the next mission components. These will include options for both group work or individual work and can be completed in multiple formats. The Mission Research activity and any note-taking that is done can serve as a formative assessment tool to understand students’ comprehension of key standards you want to emphasize.

The Mission Video should be played after students have completed the Mission Research activity (or the PowerPoint Briefing - if chosen instead). Consider playing the video more than once and, on the second viewing, asking students to take notes in their Mission Pack about the geography, the scientific questions being asked, and the people involved in the work. This note-taking activity, however, is not necessary for competing the mission.

After viewing the Mission Video students are ready to complete the Science Mission and the STEM Project. There is no right or wrong order to doing these investigations and depending on your learning goals for the mission, you could select to only do one of these two multi-step activities. Neither activity is required for understanding the other. Information on the standards addressed in each activity are detailed in the Mission-specific standards documents. If students require remediation, you can provide calculations or graphs from the teacher version of the materials, and have students use these materials to draw inferences and make predictions. The Science Mission is designed so students have the tools to ask questions based on material in the videos, and the data to test hypotheses and make predictions. A critical point in these investigations is that there may be no right answer at times, so students will need to weigh evidence (like scientists do) and decide what might be needed to better answer questions. In the STEM Project a diversity of content is available. Most are designed to help students think creatively about how to design and test solutions. Others give students hands-on experience with computer programs (and in one case, simple coding) or more work with mathematics during their scientific enquiry.

Next, complete the Explore Your Backyard activity. These activities are designed to encourage students to dive deeper into a project’s content, discover disciplinary standards and cross-cutting concepts, and connect to their local community. These activities can be done outside (ideally) or online by visiting locations virtually.

After Explore Your Backyard, have students complete the My Explorations page. This is where they will answer their own questions created at the beginning of the mission.

Finally, have students work with the Career Briefs and Videos. There are no specific activities for the Careers modules, but we suggest having students pick a career that they are most interested in and investigate it further. They can take notes about careers in their Mission Pack. Consider designing creative writing assignments in which students imagine what they would do in careers they are interested in or develop posters to advertise a career.

We hope you enjoy Science 3D! We are excited to bring real science, amazing animals, and some of the world’s most inspiring scientists into your classroom. We appreciate your feedback and thoughts on how to improve or extend the impact of our project. Send your great ideas to info@symbioeducation.com!