Lesson Reflection

I taught a lesson on Mars and space exploration by leading my students on a virtual field trip through Mars using the NASA Access Mars platform. I taught it to a group of twelve Kindergarten and First grade students. The lesson took about 20 minutes.

What went well: The students loved it! The interface made it feel like we were blasting off into space, which helped my students immerse themselves into the exploration. It felt like navigating a video game world. I think the students enjoyed the sense of agency they had to roam Mars' surface. The captions were super interesting, as well. My students loved learning about the similarities and differences between Mars and Earth, and how Mars could potentially be suitable for life.

What to improve: The content of the captions was interesting to the kids, but it was written a little above their reading level. I ended up summarizing the captions for them. I wish I had prepared summarized captions ahead of time, instead of reading and paraphrasing on the fly. I would also probably pair this lesson with a short video on Mars in the future, so they had more context going into the video.