Chris Blizzard makes adaptations for the language level and Covid-19 protocols

ORBIT 1 Lesson 2:

Orbit 1 is all about establishing symbols, becoming emotionally involved with one's country and communicating through a press conference.

Chris Blizzard

Citizens of all countries worked away at the posters, flags and badges.

Each country decided who would be presenting during the press conference (all chose two presenters to share the burden) and who would be journalists to ask each other country questions.

Time was given to work on preparing questions and answers and to produce the materials. The language level was a challenge, and I found that although they did well asking and answering the questions during the conference, it was all a bit much to ask for them to take notes in French as presenters spoke masked and tried to project their voice across the classroom. When I did a little oral quiz afterwards to see what had sunk in, it was clear they had not absorbed enough understanding of the other countries.

What I did as a result was to post in the general STARS de Kepler channel an announcement for each of the four countries, I asked each student to look at their interview Q/A sheet and use the channel to post questions to fill in the gaps of their understanding. This was very successful, as in each announcement discussion thread, citizens of the three other countries could post questions that the citizens of the host country could answer, creating a forum that could help everyone learn from one another. Here is an example of the threads:

After giving citizens time to learn from each other, we played a little “Kepler Jeopardy” with four rounds where I asked questions about one country: any citizens of other countries could answer, and the citizens of the country in question judged whether the answer merited a point or not. At the end of each round, citizens of the country in question had a chance to speak about their country and share any other facts that they felt were worth sharing with the world. I wrote the populations of each country on the board to help focus discussions on the relative size/wealth/influence of each country.