Defer Intermediate Students Embark on Moon Survival Mission

This afternoon in the AT&T Classroom Mrs. Spence launched a space mission challenge with the Defer Intermediate fifth graders. As part of their study of the solar system, the fifth graders have been given the challenge to travel toward the Moon via the Orion spacecraft in the year 2025. Working in teams of four, each “crew” must develop a survival plan that includes items that will help the crew survive. Additionally, the crew must consider research from NASA experts and provide justification for the selection of the items in their crew’s survival plan. Before embarking on their mission, Captain Spence cautioned the space crews that their survival depends upon their ability to work cooperatively as a team to select the most useful items for their survival plan and to determine how the items will be used to survive on the moon.

Each crew is creating a short story of their moon survival using Buncee, a free multi-platform tool for creating multimedia stories and projects.With Buncee the fifth graders are able to create a visual story by using custom background templates to create Buncee slides. To each template students are able to add animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos to support their survival story. Buncee offers a very large gallery of media that students can use in their stories or the students also have the option to import media from YouTube, from Vimeo, from Dropbox, from SoundCloud, and from Gooru. The completed Buncee Moon Survival stories can be viewed online and/or saved as PDFs.