Premium
Learning About the Respiratory System is Fun for 1 st Graders Using a Gas Exchange Relay Activity via Zoom
Author(s) -
Aborn Catherine,
Halpin Patricia
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2021.35.s1.02594
Subject(s) - zoom , club , psychology , mathematics education , presentation (obstetrics) , chemistry , medicine , engineering , surgery , petroleum engineering , anatomy , lens (geology)
It is important to keep children excited and interested in scientific learning and discovery, and that has become an even more challenging task in the age of COVID‐19, when most learning is done remotely through Zoom. As part of the STEM Teaching Fellow program, a lesson was created to teach 1st graders at the STEM Lab in the Boys and Girls Club via Zoom about the human respiratory system. At the beginning of the lesson a short PowerPoint presentation provided an overview of the system. Included in the introductory section of the lesson were two short (< 2 min), relevant YouTube videos. Together with the Boys and Girls Club STEM director who was on‐site the students were directed through some hands‐on activities followed by a discussion of how to keep their respiratory systems healthy. In order to illustrate the concept of gas exchange to the students, they participated in a Gas Exchange Relay race where students were split into 3 different groups, one representing the lungs, one representing an organ, and the third representing a red blood cell who would transfer colored marbles representative of oxygen and carbon dioxide between the other 2 students. Additionally, to demonstrate the relationship between breathing rate and exercise level, the students were asked to count how many times they exhaled during a 20 second period before and after running in place for 30 seconds and then the increase in amount of breaths was explained. The students were excited to have “guest speakers” come and participated in all the activities. These hands‐on activities kept the students mentally engaged while also focusing them to think about physiological processes. The lesson and incorporated activities were an overall success, the students stayed engaged and appeared to enjoy learning more about how this specific system in their body works and how to keep it healthy.