Reviewed by Mark Turski
Associate Professor of Science Education
Few things have stirred mankind’s interest throughout history more than the desire to fly. The Event-Based Science series uses the quest for flight as the basis for the module First Flight! This package of video, student materials, and teacher support provides a five-week unit structured around the design and construction of a new airplane for an air show. It can be used as a whole to support National Science Education Standards in physical science and technology, or adapted to enrich an area of a more traditional curriculum.
A video clip of Voyager’s flight around the world provides an introduction to the topic. The 66-page student edition features background materials and a series of activities that lead to completion of the major project. The comprehensive teacher's guide has some background information, a time line, answers, helpful hints to the activities, black line masters for handouts, and a resource list. The Event-Based Science website is a valuable resource in itself and provides a different set of First Flight! resources that I feel are even more helpful than those listed in the guide.
Students form cooperative groups for their project work: chief aeronautical engineer, design engineer, safety engineer, and marketing engineer. Interviews with professionals in these fields introduce these roles, and newspaper stories from USA Today provide background material. Interdisciplinary activities from mathematics, social studies, and English are also included. I thought the writing assignments were excellent. Assessment rubrics for all the activities are provided for the teacher.
The activities support a variety of concepts: center of gravity, forces, action/reaction, lift, drag, thrust, and Bernoulli’s principle. However, the specific science concepts themselves are not the strongest point of the program--because the program is project-based, it stresses scientific habits of mind, the nature of science, collaborative work, and science process skills. These are the skills that students need to survive in a world that requires a higher degree of scientific literacy than ever before.
No science program is perfect, and First Flight! does have its weaknesses. This is not a program that the average middle school science teacher can jump into without some training and the appropriate science background. However, many training sessions are available and are listed on the website. The news video is poorly edited; it is two news stories from two different days that looks like a single story on first viewing. The assessment rubrics need to be more specific in defining the outcomes and the levels of accomplishment, but a teacher could easily modify these. I also would have liked to see pictures of finished student projects posted on the website so that new users of the program could have an idea of what the finished products might look like.
As a college level science educator I feel that First Flight! teaches the skills that lead to success in post-secondary science courses. Students cannot pass the module by divining what the teacher wants; they need to develop critical thinking, writing, and cooperative group skills. The integrative nature and the blend of content and process merit serious consideration from any school district thinking of switching to a standards-based curriculum. While the module is aimed at the middle school student, many secondary physical science programs would also find it appropriate.
Review posted on 5/16/2001
|