Implementation of “What’s Your Dragon?”(SoI-GR-573)

juillet 26, 2024

2080

Author

Konstantina Tsirmpa, Teacher of Information Technology

School Organization

1st Primary School of Tripoli, Greece

Abstract/Introduction

Inspired by this learning scenario written by Ana Polombito Karamatić, I thought of asking my students to design their own dragon to become the hero of their own story. My fourth grade students of a state primary school of Greece have already been familiar with a number of fairy tales including dragons and have also delved in the Greek mythology and the Hercules’ labors. I thus thought that they would be really interested if they were asked to get divided in 5 groups of five students and then collaboratively:

Draw a two-dimensional dragon using a digital drawing tool (Tux paint)
Turn it into a three-dimensional dragon with pieces of lego
Make it the hero of a Mind+ project
And turn the project into an animation video using an AI tool, like Fliki

The main aim of the scenario was to help my students appreciate the Europeana portal and its great contribution in maintaining our digital cultural heritage, as well as our need and obligation to know and respect the creators’ copyright. Through a creative project, my students will have given flesh to a figment of their imagination and they will have developed their digital as well as life skills, by engaging their creature into a course of meaningful and interactive actions.

1. The narrative (Learning process/Stages of implementation)

This learning scenario was implemented in two 45-minute lessons, both of which took place at a computer lab. The first lesson was devoted to the fulfillment of the first two tasks, creating a dragon in both two and three dimensions, whereas, the second lesson was devoted to the other two tasks, involving the dragon in a Mind+ story and turning that story into an animation video.

First Lesson

As a warm-up activity (5 min), I employed the scenario’s idea to use Europeana images of various dragons and brainstorm relevant words in a digital word cloud in an attempt to encourage students to practice their writing skills. However, I didn’t focus on describing physical or personal characteristics, but rather on narrating a story. Similarly, as an Information Technology teacher myself and not an EFL teacher like the writer of the initial scenario, I omitted all the activities related to the story of dragons blog and I focused on developing their writing in their mother tongue and not in a foreign language, using at the same time a number of digital tools. (Yet, the collaboration with an EFL teacher and the accomplishment of both goals would be an interesting expansion of this scenario.)

As for the first two tasks, my students were familiar with using the digital drawing tool, Tux paint and they thus found it easy to collaborate on drawing a colorful dragon. That activity took them no more than 15 minutes.

As for the lego construction, having at their disposal a sufficient quantity of all kinds of pieces (provided by the school), their main challenge was to make it resemble their drawing as much as they could in a span of 15 minutes. In the remaining time (10), they presented their constructions to the rest of the class and expressed their feelings about the whole learning process.

Second lesson

Having decided on the main features of their dragons and their properties and abilities, my students looked forward to processing to the next lesson during which they would put their dragon into action. As they were already familiar with the Mind+ software, all they needed was to make up a story. That activity took them 20 minutes and as soon as they finished their projects, they presented them to the rest of the class.

It was now the turn of the teacher to impress the students by presenting a new AI tool called Fliki that they had never seen before. By just copying the main story from the Mind+ project, this tool turned it into an animation video with amazing images and fascinating music.

2. Outcomes (for you as an educator and for the students)

It was definitely a pleasant and innovative lesson that both my students and I enjoyed to the utmost. Personally, what I liked best was the fact that I engaged my students into a project-based process that was increasingly more demanding both intellectually and digitally. My role was facilitatory, and encouraging, restricted primarily to providing my students with practical help concerning the digital tools.

As for my students, focused on creating something different and unique, they were motivated in practicing a number of skills, from searching for images to find relevant features to collaborating to end up with a single story plot. Working in groups, they also developed a certain degree of emulation rather than competitiveness and the main task being an imaginary story dispelled any fear of being wrong.