Unleashing the Orb of the Night

Team name: Lunar walkers
Project Start and End date: 22^nd Jul 2013 to 16^th Sept 2013
Type of project: Science (Astronomy)
Class: VII
Teacher: Nalini Ujre
Team members: Samarth Jain (team leader), Ahaan Bhatnagar, Gursameep Singh, Devyanshu Rout
Overview of the project:

The Moon has been a very important object along Mankind’s history.  In olden times, the moon was used to make the first definitions of the length of the months, and it is observed that it affects the life of people that live in certain ocean coastlines due to the tides. Now, humans have uncovered many interesting facts about the moon. This project tries to explore the topic and present the facts in a fun and engaging way. The students will enhance their technical, analytical and social skills through the project.

Alice is fun 3D environment. A topic presented in Alice is more appealing to students since it is animation than facts read from a book. Students enjoy programming using Alice and present their project. This is clearly seen from the feedback/learning experiences shared by the students.

Learning objectives:

Subject Learning objectives 1. Understand what a lunar month is and how it is calculated. 2. Know how far the moon is from the earth and long it would take to reach there. 3.  Understand the dimensions and the surface composition of the moon. 4.  Understand the phases of the moon and the orbit of the moon. 5.   Know the facts related to man’s first travel to the moon.

Alice 3.1 Learning objectives 1.  Understand how to create an initial scene with appropriate objects and settings. 2.   Understanding the use of procedural abstraction. 3.   Understand the use of variables and arrays. 4.   Understand how to accept and process user input through “functions”. 5. Understand how to manipulate objects through keyboard input and mouse input.

Project Schedule:

Project task	Start and End dates	Number of periods (40 min)	Activity
Project planning	23.07.13 to 29.07.13	2	Selection of group, topic
Task scheduling	30.07.13 to 05.08.13	2	Assignment of roles, drafting the project overview, discussion of deliverables, creating a scenario
Fact collection and pre-project survey	06.08.13 to 12.08.13	2	Conduct a survey among the students of the class about their existing knowledge on the topic. Collect relevant facts on the topic from sources such as textbook, the Internet and other books (library).
Create the animation	13.08.13 to 02.09.13	6	Divide the project among the group and create the animation.
Showcase the project	03.09.13 to 09.09.13	2	Alice project presentation and PowerPoint presentation to the class
Assessment and Reflection	10.09.13 to 16.09.13	2	Q & A session on the topic, documenting team members’ experience. Evaluation, reflection and analysis of the project by the team members.

Evaluation Rubric for Student Presentations:

Assessment criteria 1.    Creating an initial scene 2.   Alice animation 3.   Understanding of topic by the group 4.  Keyboard and mouse control, procedural abstraction 5.   Team work 6.   Creativity 7.   Powerpoint presentation 8.   Survey and fact collection 9.   Post-project Q & A Total

Max Marks 10 30 5 10 5 10 10 10 10 100

Resources:
http://www.eaae-astronomy.org/moonwalkers/
http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/time/moon/facts.htm

Student experiences working on the project

Samarth Jain (Team Leader)

Working in Alice was an amazing experience. When we started working on the same we never thought of creating such a big program. Last year in San Francisco during the Thinkquest Award Ceremony when I heard about Alice, I was very curious to work on the same and wanted to create a quiz game. Now here it is, where we have learned a lot, to be precise also learned how to meet bugs and handle them.

Challenges – Many times we have seen the finish line “before the finish” when we encounter the bug, i.e. back to start again. Over all this is a great experience of learning by fun. Thanks to Principal Sir, teachers for guiding us and giving this opportunity.

Devyanshu

First when we thought about what to choose as our Topic we wanted to educate the user about something new so, we chose the topic ‘Moon’. We all worked together as one and learned many new things hidden in ALICE. Overall this experience was great and our our project was a huge success. Thanks to our teachers.

Ahaan
Working in this project with my team mates and teachers was actually fun. It was educative and yet a fun filled to learn new stuff. It was a fun learning experience and I hope there will be more projects like this to come.