To mark Science week this year, Room 7 decided to take on the challenge from Science Foundation Ireland called #creatingourfuture. The challenge was to look at ways to improve your local area or community to create a better future for those in it. We decided to look at this from a student's viewpoint and see how we could improve our own school community to help improve overall student well-being.
We chose to focus on re-imagining our school yard because there is currently not much in it, the space is limited and the Covid rules limit our choice of games to play. We felt that a better yard would improve students' yard play experience, improve well-being, a more active yard would promote better fitness and health and more organised games would decrease boredom or problems when trying to choose what to play together.
The process: We started with a brainstorming session where we all gave our ideas and discussed which would work best. One group formed a management team who put together a whole school survey to try to find out if other students felt as we did about the problems on the yard. The survey aimed to identify exactly what problems students were having on yard. Other groups worked on four separate areas that we wanted to see implemented in the yard; a basketball court, a football pitch, a playground and a quiet space. The management team put forward these ideas in the survey to measure student demand for each of them. The management team measured all areas of the yard and we created a scaled down map for each group to work from. The groups exploring the play area ideas did a lot of research into the benefits of these for students, into how we could create them and analysed the cost of each proposal. The data from the survey was our guide as to what would work best as solutions to the problems identified in it. We have been learning how to use Minecraft for Education so we thought this would be a great opportunity to put this knowledge to use to best display our re-imagined yard. We experimented with which scale would work best on Minecraft, the management team built a template yard based on this map and then we worked together as a whole class to build each of the proposed play areas as we had envisaged them.
Each group prepared a presentation on their research area and we filmed the final presentation. We also filmed the Minecraft 3D map with each of us as virtual school children playing in the yard and using the facilities to make it seem like real life. Ms O'Brien edited all the footage together to create our science project film: #creatingourfuture.
We hope you like it!
Just click on the link below to watch -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORm95nHbnSE
