WAP 4 - Students as Researchers

                                                     

 “Just because you know how to operate a hammer,
doesn’t mean you know how to build a house.”

So true...

After talking about research in terms of building web literacy, vetting information, and asking good questions, I wondered how I would design a lesson to begin exploring these topics with my preschoolers.  I knew I wanted to check out the Google Custom Search Engine, and began creating a lesson around that, when another opportunity organically presented itself.

So much more relevant...

The other day at lunch, two of my students were very excited to discover that they both had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle sandwich keepers.   And, they remembered that the day before one of their classmates wore a T-shirt with a Ninja Turtle on it.

Which turtle is which?  I wondered out loud.  When nobody had an answer, I offered that I knew from when my nephew was a big fan, that there were four turtles and they were named Michelangelo, Rafael, Leonardo and Donatello.   But I could never remember which one wore which color.  Kids started to guess, but admitted they didn’t really know.

So how could we find out?  And then how would we know if we got the right answer?  Thus began a great opportunity to start using some of what we had talked about in tech class.

We could Google it or ask Alexa or Siri.  We could ask a grown up.  We could ask a kid.  We could watch one of the TMNT movies.  We could watch one of their tv shows.  We could read one of their books.  All good suggestions for gathering information.

But how would we know we got the right answer?  If we tried to ask another person, would it be better to ask a kid or a grown up?  What age group would have the best chance of being able to give us a correct answer?   If we googled it, would it be better to look at a web site that carries the show on its channel (like nick.com) or would it be better to look at a web site that was just regular people answering what they think (like quora.com)?

In the end, we found this great picture by googling images for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and then trying to check the veracity of the names at Nick.com.  Interestingly, the US site had only episodes to stream and games to play, while the UK site had a section to Meet the Characters, so that was much more useful.  Information there matched our picture, and we were confident we had our answer.

Hopefully this home-grown example got them thinking about how we go about finding answers to our questions, and how to determine the usefulness of what we find, and how to ask good questions to refine our results.

Addendum:
After embracing the Ninja Turtle diversion, I did go back and look at creating a custom search engine to find kid-friendly info about different animals.  My work in progress is here.