- Hi and welcome to DoubleHelix lessons from CSIRO.
Today I'm going to take you through the student view
which will show you how fun and engaging
the lessons can be for your students.
I'll be using the natural disasters module
which is available as a free trial on our website
so you can follow this along yourselves
on your own, later.
The first thing the students will do
is meet Sky and Rocky and their friend,
Kevin the Chameleon to get them interested
in the topic of natural disasters.
(exciting music)
- Sky, did you know there are volcanoes in Australia?
And that one of them recently erupted?
- Really, this is isn't like the time
you were trying to convince me that chameleon Kevin
flew to the moon is it?
- No, this is for real.
Check it out, I just read about it
in DoubleHelix magazine.
- [Instructor] The students can then read the article
from DoubleHelix magazine or if they'd prefer,
they can just listen to the audio,
which will take them through
where that volcano is in Australia
and when it erupted.
Now we have Rocky's animation,
which explains a little bit more
about what the students can expect to see
when there is a natural disaster.
Rocky has developed this animation
to cover bush fires, volcanoes, floods and hurricanes.
The student can click on one of the natural disasters
to see the types of impact that
that natural disaster will cause.
So this is a bush fire, which you can see the flames
starting to develop, the sky is starting
to go a little bit dark with the smoke coming through.
And then they'll be ember drops,
which explains one of the other dangers of a bush fire,
even if it doesn't come that close.
Once the students have explored those animations,
and got a little bit more information
about what makes a natural disaster,
they can do this poll, which will explain the options
and take the students through to vote
on what they think might be a natural disaster.
There is a lot of hands-on activities
in the DoubleHelix lessons, which helps bring to life
some of the theory and concepts
that might be a little bit difficult to understand.
And there's no better way to do that
than with chocolate.
So in this activity we take a chocolate bar
with some nougat, caramel and an outer crust of chocolate
to explain the earth's layers.
The students can pick up, drag, and drop
the various labels to see if they've got right
what each element represents.
And they can work through this with their students
or with a real chocolate bar.
And you can see I've got that wrong,
the teacher can bring this back to them
once it's submitted to say no,
the outer layer is the crust with chocolate.
We have the mantle with the caramel
and the core with the nougat.
And then you can answer some questions
about the activity and how it reflects
the sorts of theory that we've already been taken to.
And then that will be submitted to the teacher.
There's another activity that will take you through
building a rain gauge.
The beauty of this activity is that the students
can actually take this home
and then measure rainfall over a number of days.
It may be that the first day there was five mils,
then there was two, and then there was none.
You can then graph this rainfall here,
on day one, we had three mils.
On day two, we might have had five mils.
And on day three we had none.
And so they also get that mathematical element,
where they're looking at graphing their activity.
There are crosswords that will take you through
how to answer questions through this sort
of fun activity and there are many other types
of assessment tools, self-assessment and quizzes
that can be submitted to the teacher
and you can track how they're performing
with their activities.
DoubleHelix lessons will also introduce you
to real scientists.
These help explain where a scientist
might learn about science,
what professions they can have
through their science education
and that there are real life applications
for the work that they're doing.
Here we meet Dr. Victoria Miller,
who is a volcanologist.
(screen beeps)
- [Student] Hi, Victoria.
I'm looking for someone to help me find out more
about natural disasters, can you help me?
- Hi, yeah, certainly hope so.
I'm a volcanologist, so my background
is actually in studying volcanoes,
things like why they erupt and how we can monitor them
to see when they might erupt.
In my past, I've worked in research, teaching,
and even in emergency management,
so helping communities learn to live more safely
with natural hazards.
Here in my current job, I work in a team
to try and better understand natural hazards
like earthquakes and volcanoes
and the impact that they have on people,
so that we can try and help people live more safely.
- [Student] So you--
- So Dr. Victoria Miller
now takes us through the rest
of the natural disasters modules
to explain how her work works.
And then right at the end, there is some just for fun,
which means that the students can extend
and build on their knowledge
with some fun quizzes and activities.
For example, what sort of natural disaster are you?
There are so many fun and engaging elements
through these student views.
Check out more videos on our website
for these plus the teacher tools
that will help you use DoubleHelix lessons.
Thanks for listening.