Before I share an amazing resource for getting some awesome gamified Science lessons, I wanted to share a cool resource for having students request photos to be taken of locations on Earth from the International Space Station (ISS)! Yes, the students choose where the ISS camera will take the photos based on the ISS’s orbit! I put together a fun quest on Classcraft called Planet Earth pictured below taking advantage of one of the ISS missions for my students from the Sally Ride EarthKAM website! It’s easy and free and they have missions coming up all the time.
The above image is a sample photo one of my students requested. To tie our photo requests to my curriculum I tasked students with requesting photos of rivers, lakes, estuaries, oceans, or other waterways like the one above! The detail is amazing and we get copies of each image of different sizes including a large tiff of about 30 to 40 MBs!
The above quest, my Zombie Apocalypse quest, was inspired by a Gamification Schoolhouse gamified disease unit lesson plan! Click on Products at the top of the website to find some ready-made, fully gamified, Science lesson plans ranging from free to $10 (can also be found on Teachers Pay Teachers)! I was able to get and use the full Google Slides of the Happy Zombie Apocalypse Day lesson for free but I opted to purchase the $10 Teacher’s Guide and it was well worth it as it helped me wrap my brain around how to actually have students play the game and included tons of resources for teaching about diseases. I added current COVID references but kept it mostly about a fake zombie apocalypse to keep it more light-hearted and fun since we are living through an actual pandemic. The lesson was a great way to teach kids about the immune system, bacteria and viruses, and about disease in general without really having to deal with COVID.
When I teach remote, synchronous online lessons I always put together a Google Slideshow using Pear Deck to make it interactive. Pear Deck is another tool that kids love and glues them to my slideshows because they get to participate and then view not only their responses but the responses of their classmates anonymously! This presentation was actually done live without Pear Deck to my face-to-face students on the first day of school. I didn’t add Pear Deck because the slideshow was my intro to the course before kids accessed their laptops so I did not make it interactive for Cohorts A and B students. The intro slideshow below also introduced the Happy Zombie Apocalypse Day quest and game disease unit to students and the slides about the zombie apocalypse are directly from the Gamification Schoolhouse slides. I added the interactive Pear Deck elements after the fact, including the first slide that would not have worked live without Pear Deck, and assigned the interactive slideshow to the remote-only Cohort C students using Pear Decks student-paced mode so they could go through the Pear Deck at their own pace and complete it whenever they were ready.
To tie Classcraft and the Happy Zombie Apocalypse Day quest together and into my Star Trek class theme, I weaved the story into Star Trek. To begin with I have students see themselves as medical and science officers if they chose to play Classcraft as healers, engineers if they chose mages, and command and operations if they chose guardians. Then I introduced the zombie disease unit game as taking place during one of our routine missions to a planet called Akaali. We were sent there by Starfleet Command to help because of our environmental expertise. So as students completed environmental stewardship project activities in class in real life, I made it part of our story on the planet Akaali, adding the zombie element. Students earned Food and Water rations as they completed Zombie Apocalypse quest objectives as well as earning Classcraft XP and gold!
Once we reached the deadline to complete as many assignments from the Zombie Apocalypse Classcraft quest, I had students tally all the food and water rations they earned to decide how to use them as we made our way to the landing zone where we could be beamed back aboard our starship. With my face-to-face students I rolled the dice live, I even invited my principal into one of the classes to view the rolling of the dice as part of my evaluation! For my remote-only students I rolled the dice and recorded the results using Screencast-O-Matic. Here are the results of those dice rolls that I shared with the remote-only students that was very much like the live dice rolls that concluded our game:
I had a lot of fun with this quest and the activities because I do enjoy zombie stories and I love incorporating play into my lessons! Kids had a good time, too. Every time we would go outdoors we would be on the lookout for zombies and we could take about viruses and diseases openly in class because it was a fictitious zombie virus. After rolling the dice for 60 kids only a few got infected! That was easily dealt with because we are a Starfleet Science vessel crew and with help from the Akaalians, we were able to get enough information about the virus to synthesize a vaccine saving our infected crew members and saving the planet from extinction! In real life it was the healers using their healing powers in Classcraft to get their infected teammates back to full HP or health.
I’m so glad I found the Gamification Schoolhouse and this awesome activity! It is very well done and very well organized! If I taught the other subjects I would totally use those lessons as well.
