Activity Introduction

Module: Biodiversity

Year levels: 7 and 8

Activity details: Students will apply what they know about their local biodiversity to create a tool to help their community judge the state of the biodiversity around them. Students will treat this as an open-ended problem solving challenge and choose a media to develop their biodiversity indicator.

Learning goals for this activity include:

1. Create a tool for their community to make judgments about their local biodiversity.

2. Apply past learning to identify simple and usable criteria to indicate on a scale the health of biodiversity.

3. Use problem solving techniques in choosing observable criteria to make the biodiversity indicator tool.

Indoor or outdoor activity: Indoor or outdoor

Duration of activity: 60 mins+

Learning areas addressed: Geography, Science, Civics and Citizenship, Mathematics, English.

Teacher input: Keep asking students to justify their solutions and assist them to think of new solutions if they are stuck.

Resources needed: Computers, software, maybe digital cameras and other images.

Homework and extension opportunities: Some parts of this activity can be set as homework.

Worksheets

Teacher Worksheet

Introduction

Students will build a tool that can be used by their community. The tool will have indicators about the relative health of the local biodiversity that could include gardens. Students will choose indictors that help grade biodiversity from a high level to a low level. They may choose to use language such as 'healthy biodiversity' and 'poor biodiversity'.

Students are asked to create their own solution to this activity. Their tool will help them make a judgment.

Activity outline

Students could conduct this activity in small groups.

Students can approach this task using their own creative methods. If they want a starting point they might like to follow this sequence:

Step 1 – Decide what locations the biodiversity tool will apply to. Example:

  1. Only gardens
  2. The general suburb
  3. Only parks and reserves.

Step 2 – For the students’ area, describe what the area of highest biodiversity would be like. What would the are of poorest biodiversity be like?

Step 3 – For th

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