Planet Quest: Alien Safari
What it is: Planet Quest Alien Safari is an interactive exploration adventure that encourages students to click on “life zones” around the world to find bizarre and extreme organisms that live on Earth. Students will also learn about what the extreme organisms reveal about finding life in space. As students explore they will learn about organisms that can live without sunlight, those with the highest radiation dose, those that are the most acidic, those that live the furthest underground, those with the strangest habitat and those that are the hottest. Students click on a life zone on the 3D Earth to begin a video introduction to the organism.
How to integrate Planet Quest: Alien Safari into the classroom: Planet Quest Alien Safari is going to be a popular one with your boys. My students got a kick out of “discovering” new organisms. Use Alien Safari when discussing different life forms, classifying organisms or studying space. My students wanted to do more than just explore the organisms, they wanted to write stories about them. Students wrote creative stories imagining what kind of super hero the organism would be, or making them into super villains (As I said, the boys have fun with this one!).
Ask students to make predictions about the organisms based on where they are found, what does their geographic location tell us about the organism?
Tips: The music on this site gets a little OLD (at least for me, the kids may disagree) I had the kids use headphones when they were accessing this site independently. If you are using it with the whole class and an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer, you can turn the music off in the bottom right corner.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Planet Quest: Alien Safari in your classroom!