Critical Thinking/Inquiry

Contraption Maker incorporates Rube Golberg machines and encourages the students to be engineers and bring these contrapyions to life. Rube Goldberg created machines that were collections of random parts put together to perform simple tasks in the least efficient manner possible. This program allows for the players to take pre-built machines that have some missing parts and challenges players to repair a chain of actions to reach a specified goal. Through the use of gears, ropes, light switches, and generators, positioning laser beams and mirrors, players get the machine working and then enjoy watching the actions they combined to achieve their goal. Students use their critical thinking skills to solve simple tutorial challenges to advanced brain teasers. Students can also design their own machines and share them with classmates or online.

The Smithsonian Learning Lab allows students to search for resources including images, videos, texts, audio recordings, and learning activities. The resources that a student "collects" are added to their own collections and annotate the items. Teachers can also add their own content to the collections. Each resource can be annotated with texts, hot spots, quiz questions, and discussion questions. Published collections can be copied, shared, and remixed. Teachers can create rosters and share their collections with students. The purpose is for students to analyze the different pieces in their collection to determine purpose.

Prodigy is an adaptive math-practice game set in a fantasy role-playing universe. The characters the students create have adventures, they can chat with other students, challenge other characters and brave obstacles. The students engage in solving mathematical equations and problems to cast their wizard spells to advance in the game. As students progress in their math skills, so do their characters, learning new spells to use against enemies. Teachers can create curriculum perameters for based on students' math abilities. Students develop their critical thinking skills by solving the math problems and engaging in the game.