Participate and share: Poster 
As an IB school, the Exhibition project (PYPX) is an important event in the educational journey of our students, taking place at the end of Grade 4. For some years, children have approached the project by selecting, inquiring then presenting about one of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which they are particularly passionate about.
Whilst the PYPX has taken on this focus in recent years, our school community has also been undergoing a digital transformation, with a Technology curriculum that develops with each successive year. However, fitting Technology lessons into an already varied curriculum has been a challenge. Therefore, our solution at Craighouse has been the application of essential technological concepts to longstanding IB projects such as the Units of Inquiry and the PYPX.
The proposed idea for ISTE Live 24 is a development of a project that applies to our Unit of Inquiry 'Sharing the Planet'. In this project, children develop computational thinking skills by building algorithms in Scratch to create a simulation of an ecosystem which shows concepts such food chains and how predators maintain balance within it.
As a development on a curriculum activity, we would like our ISTE project to employ a 'Design Thinking' model whereby our student participants first research a real-world ecosystem (one terrestrial and one marine) affected by human activities in the 'Empathise' stage, and then during the 'Ideate' stage, consider how they can make an application which teaches people about the human impacts in an accessible and inclusive way.
With regards to lesson planning, this project as a component of the Year 4 curriculum comprises three-weeks, two formal sessions with a week to finish or add some extra features. You can find the links to the first two sessions in the document featured in the 'Additional Details' section of this application.
In its second year, the project has enjoyed greater success than the first one, where children have been able to innovate and add features independently, for example, sounds and text.
It is worth noting that 'Learning Interactively with the SDGs' was inspired by a student's idea to include the human impact on the ecosystem (poaching the lions). From here, I wanted to see what other ideas students could bring to this project with more time to work on it.
As a presentation, the idea is that students take the audience through each stage in their design thinking process.
Initial Presentation - Empathise, Define and Ideate Stages (5 - 10 mins): Students will show the real-world ecosystems that inspired their educational application, before reflecting on both the rewards and challenges that they experienced during the Ideate stage, where they tried and tested different things in the development of the application.
Audience Participation - Prototype and Test Stages (5 - 10 mins): Students will have brought their finished applications to the ISTE Live conference and will invite the audience to try it out; the applications will require frequent user participation, to either add or remove things from the ecosystem, as well as locate informative icons to find facts and even answer quiz questions.
As a means of engaging the audience, it would be helpful to have the applications presented on two large monitors, one for each type of ecosystem, with which the audience can test. The plan also is to work with QR codes which will allow participants to try the applications from a tablet or mobile phones, making the presentation more accessible and avoiding having to wait in order to test it out.
Considering the accessibility of the project for audience members:
- S. Hardin (2020), 'Accessibility Tip Sheet', Macomb Intermediate School District
- National Center on Accessible Educational Materials [Accessed Sept. 2023], 'Designing for Accessibility'
Learning best practice on teaching algorithms as a foundation of our project:
- J. Crossman (2023), 'Exploring Algorithms', Hello World Magazine - Issue 21
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