Microbiology and the New Curriculum for Wales: Part 2
So, I finally got a chance to see and interact with the draft of the new website!
It looked great and I was really impressed with the content and how interactive it was. If this is the draft stage then I am very excited to see the final product.
I asked two trusted pupils in year 11 to have a little browse, and I just watched them interact with it. They read some facts, played some games and passed comments on how impressed they were with various technical aspects which were totally lost on me!
Our school is one of only 2 secondary schools involved with this project, so I did think it was important to see if it was geared to meet the needs and interests of GCSE students, and it did. There were some really good games already on there which will be good for KS3 and 4. I also liked the fact that the games required some reading, using a comic book style format, which will help literacy skills.
The team then had a good discussion about the parts we liked and where we thought it might need more. As I said, the website is being designed to meet the needs of pupils aged 6-16, and is not merely based in the science subjects, so the scope is huge. I really hope that the history team, the careers team, maths and english teams, all choose to use this website and its resources within our school. We will share it on our school social media and hopefully engage parents too, widening the catchment even further. I do know that our pupils go home and tell their parents about lessons, and science is especially good for this as the pupils are so excited about new things they have learned and they want to tell their parents. This will be a great way for the school and home to connect a bit more. We can look at timelines or models of outbreaks, medical breakthroughs and vaccines; all too topical really!
So, the next steps are for us all to consider the further needs of our schools. Personally, I would like to make a Blooket ( a fun game/quiz based app which I have been using as memory aids and revision) and see if that is of any use to the Superbugs site. I will try out the minecraft game which was mentioned. I would like to ask the designers for a specific kind of game which allows the students to model some aspect of microbiology, as computer modelling is a weakness in our schemes so far. We will also continue to collect feedback from pupils from our various schools and find out what they really want to see on a useful website.
