Within our eTwinning project “Eureka”, a bilateral project between Turkey and Germany, we asked our students what to do to invent a better world. They added their ideas, voted for the best ones and worked on them in transnational teams to make their wishes real.

TEAM 1 : INVENT SOMETHING FOR ANIMALS

TEAM 2: INVENT SOMETHING FOR LONELY CHILDREN

TEAM 3: INVENT A NEW GAME

Students in two countries identified a problem together, made brainstorming, decided the design, built, tested/evaluated/shared with us.  

In this blog post, I will share you the details of Team 1’s work for animals. Students come together online and discussed about the details with the help of teachers using the web tools “meeting words”.

Students decided how to move among their ideas using the design poster that we have shared with them beforehand. They followed some steps online:

IDENTIFY A PROBLEM: 
It is difficult for little birds to find some food especially in winter. It is hard to find water in summer too.

BRAINSTORM: What do we need?
Birdseed, food waste, coat rack, a pot should be organic not to harm nature. Water, tree to hang, string or rope.

DESIGN:
It is important to use an organic pot. We shouldn’t harm nature. We put bird seeds in something natural. So we can use an orange skin to put our bird seeds in and then we make drills and fasten with string to hang.

BUILD: 
We penetrate the orange skin and we pass through the string so that it can be hanged on a tree.

TEST/EVALUATE:
We are going to make this one and put on a tree to see if birds reach and feed themselves.

SHARE/REDESIGN:
If it does not work, we can make adjustments.

Students from both Germany and Turkey created their bird feeder at the same time and reflected their feelings about the activity. Here you see the pictures from the students in Turkey. ??????

After the activity, we observed that birds could not feed themselves from the pot that we have prepared for them, instead they preferred to eat bird seeds from the ground.

It was a perfect way to get kids interested in nature. They made their own bird feeders, observed the birds eating, and reflected that they would do this for their own house. It was easy and so much fun!