Curriculum and Evaluation Materials
SimForest Teacher's Guide - [
HTML Version]
Sample lessons and teaching tips for using the SimForest simulation
and field trips to learn about forests and trees.
Curriculum Overview
SimForest is a tool not a teacher. It does not contain curricular
elements such as instructions, prompts, or questions. In has attractive
graphics that appeared to draw students in to using the model during
initial trials. It allows students to make changes to a plot's soil,
climate, seed pool and trees. It provides data, and graphing tools
to help analyze the data. But, it does not give students any clues
or suggestions about how to use any of the features or information.
At first, this lack of structure may appear to be desirable because
it gives students opportunities to pursue their own questions in
an open-ended way. However, in our initial tests of the software,
we found that without guidance and with limited time it was often
difficult for students to come up with interesting answerable questions.
Framing a question may be the first step in the inquiry
process, but it is sometimes the most difficult to master. When beginning
to work with a new tool or subject, students often lack the background
knowledge, confidence, and experience required to form good questions
on their own. In addition, teachers, who may themselves be unfamiliar
with the program, concepts, and the inquiry cycle, may feel more comfortable
leading activities with SimForest if the software is accompanied by
curricular materials. For all of these reasons it became apparent
early on that the SimForest program should not stand on its own. In
order to achieve its potential as an inquiry tool, it should be accompanied
by scaffolding (e.g. questions, activities and suggestions that help
provide structure and guide students through the inquiry process).