What’s more exciting than daydreaming about finding buried treasure on ancient shipwrecks?


What if we asked students to imagine themselves discovering the secrets held inside ancient Greek and Roman shipwrecks? Imagine hunting for them, deep in the murky depths of the Black Sea as the lights from our high-tech, submersible, underwater vehicles sweep left and right across the sea floor. Imagine what it would be like if we not only found them, but when we uncovered them, we actually found them completely intact, precisely as they looked when the ships went down. All the cargo still in the ship’s hold. All the sailors still aboard.

You see, that’s possible because of two amazing phenomena that happen in the Black Sea: the sea floor is a unique gelatinous substance that envelops anything of substantial weight that falls down to it; the water of the Black Sea is anoxic at a certain depth, which does not support the organisms that would normally consume the wood or other carbon-based materials that fall to the bottom of other bodies of water.

The potential to find complete shipwrecks in this environment is extremely high.

If an explorer could get into these waters, which were politically difficult to navigate for much of the 20th Century, what might we find? What would those ships have been carrying? What secrets of history are held in timeless suspension? Currently, Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic and the HL Hunley, is working hard to uncover and share these portals to history with today’s world.

…biology, history, geography, politics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, archaeology, research, writing…

These are all topics ripe for exploration as students are asked to learn about the Ancient Merchant Ships of the Black Sea.

“We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;--
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.”

Arthur O’Shaugnessy (Ode – Music and Moonlight (1874)

Today’s free LifePractice PBL recipe card is the “Martian Colony” where students are asked to design a plan for a Martian colony. Kids’ brains go into imagination overdrive as we weave in space science, engineering, biology, atmospheric sciences, technology, math, and yes, even pioneering history, if you’d like! Read stories from early imagineer, Ray Bradbury! Read actual primary documents from NASA about what Mars is really like!

Ask your young imagineers to write expository or technical explanations for the people left behind on Earth. Ask them to let their brains go wild with narrative writing. Create new space-level Jacques Cousteaus, as the kids take you through their new Martian landscape with a video story, complete with a soundscape soundtrack!

Build it big…big enough to fill an entire gymnasium!

Build it table-top size so the gravity of earth creates no boundaries!

Use a green screen technology to bring in the Martian landscape!

This is a wonderful project for beginning space science to the most complex engineering classes you offer.

Let YOUR imagination go wild with Martian Colony, a LifePractice PBL card, free to you, just today!

It’s time again! Today only, we’re giving away another LifePractice PBL card, this time from one of my favorite sets, Set 6.

The card is called, Pandemic! where students are challenged to predict and stop the world’s next catastrophic disease.

I’m excited about this card because, like all great Project Based Learning, it’s rooted in reality. We will have another large-scale pandemic; in fact, some say that there are small-scale beginnings occurring right now in several places in the world.

I’ve shown this card to Science teachers who are excited to use it to help kids understand bacteria and viruses. I’ve seen Math teachers giddy (yes, giddy) with the real-life application of statistics and number-crunching that is involved here. I’ve even, as recently as today, had High School Geography teachers jumping at the chance to use this project to hook kids into looking deeper into the climate and living conditions across continents.

These teachers are just beginning to see that once kids get hooked into this Pandemic! project, there are many ways to have the learning progress.

Will students create room-sized models of cells to see how the pathogen will affect humans and animals? Will they be creating real Public Service Announcements to help people learn how to protect themselves? Is is a great way to learn Geography or is it an engaging way to learn Health and Wellness? It is Science or is it English Language Arts? The answer to all those questions is YES!

The truth is this PBL recipe card (and all the rest of our 49 LifePractice PBL recipe cards) is a perfect way to plant seeds in your mind about how to engage your kids in learning. To help our kids to not just be students sitting in the classroom, but in becoming active participants in their own education, and active participants in our world. It’s more than school. It’s LifePractice Learning.

Let us know how you incorporated these ideas to hook your kids deeper into learning!