Quick Look
Grade Level: 5
Time Required: 1 hour
Expendable Cost/Group: US $0.00
Group Size: 3
Activity Dependency: None
Subject Areas: Earth and Space
Quick Look 
Summary
Students develop briefings for a TV evening news program that summarizes their experiences surviving in the Amazon rainforest. They role play as interviewer and interviewee in class presentations.
Engineering Connection
Engineers must be able to effectively communicate complex problems to other people who are not engineers. This lesson and activity provides an opportunity for students to practice doing that.
Learning Objectives
Be able to summarize their engineering adventures and communicate them to others.
Educational Standards
Each TeachEngineering lesson or activity is correlated to one or more K-12 science,
technology, engineering or math (STEM) educational standards.
All 100,000+ K-12 STEM standards covered in TeachEngineering are collected, maintained and packaged by the Achievement Standards Network (ASN),
a project of D2L (www.achievementstandards.org).
In the ASN, standards are hierarchically structured: first by source; e.g., by state; within source by type; e.g., science or mathematics;
within type by subtype, then by grade, etc.
Each TeachEngineering lesson or activity is correlated to one or more K-12 science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) educational standards.
All 100,000+ K-12 STEM standards covered in TeachEngineering are collected, maintained and packaged by the Achievement Standards Network (ASN), a project of D2L (www.achievementstandards.org).
In the ASN, standards are hierarchically structured: first by source; e.g., by state; within source by type; e.g., science or mathematics; within type by subtype, then by grade, etc.
State Standards
Colorado - Science
-
Use information and communication technology tools to gather information from credible sources, analyze findings, and draw conclusions to create and justify an evidence-based scientific explanation
(Grade
7)
More Details
Do you agree with this alignment?
Materials List
- pencil and paper
Introduction/Motivation
See the storyline under the Introduction/Motivation section of Lesson 7.
Procedure
- Provide students with a series of questions that the "interviewer" will ask them. Emphazie that responses must be be short and concise as is typical of evening news programs. The following questions were included in the previous activity's Student Guide Worksheet. 1) What did you enjoy most about your adventure in the Amazon? 2) What did you find to be the most challenging? 3) What skill(s) did you learn that will be helpful in the future? 4) What was the most memorable part of your adventure? In addition, students were asked to come up with two of their own questions/answers to share their Amazon rainforest adventure tales.
- Either let the groups decide who will be the interviewee or choose for each team. Alternatively, have the teacher be the interviewer or pick one student to perform that role.
- Once students have answered the questions and are ready to role play, designate an interview area, such as the front of the classroom, and invite the representatives (interviewees) from each group to come up. Set up chairs in a modified horseshoe to create a sitting area similar to a TV studio such that all the participants are facing the "audience."
- To conduct the news show, the interviewer asks a question and each group representative responds with his/her prepared statement in turn.
Assessment
Worksheet: Each student group completes and hands-in the activity worksheet from the previous activity, providing their group's answers to the four interviewer questions and providing their own additional two questions/answers. Review their worksheets to gauge their depth of engagement and comporehension.
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Copyright
© 2013 by Regents of the University of Colorado; original © 2005 Colorado School of MinesSupporting Program
Adventure Engineering, Colorado School of MinesAcknowledgements
Adventure Engineering was supported by National Science Foundation grant nos. DUE 9950660 and GK-12 0086457. However, these contents do not necessarily represent the policies of the National Science Foundation, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.
Last modified: October 21, 2021
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