Students will learn about the process of making a big studio and/or animated sci fi movie and the diversity of skills and roles that contribute to doing so. These learnings will be contextualized within our ongoing focus this year on the value of diversity, both socially and within professional organizations. Additional coaching and curriculum on increasing executive function skills for developing, organizing and implementing big scale projects will be integrated.

Students will learn about the different biomes on earth, the animals that live in them and how energy flows through different layers of the food chain. They will collaborate to select one biome from Earth in which they will set their sci movie creatures, and each student will select a role in the food chain that their creature will play.

Students will create a 10’x10’ quadrat in their backyards and inventory the biodiversity within it as it changes across the course of the spring. Students will learn about visual representations of mathematical thinking, with advanced content for high school students in calculating and creating visual representations for rates of change and other mathematical relationships. Art studio curriculum will be integrated to develop realistic nature journals using a mix of drawing and photography, and to explore the concept of scale through miniature worlds and animation tools.

Students will learn how animals adapt to their surroundings, with in depth curriculum at the high school level on genetics and how protein synthesis influences animal characteristics. Social-emotional support will be provided to help students contextualize their own neuro-diversity and genetic variances and how this shapes their family and personal narratives.

Students will learn about food chains and eco-systems, with advanced curriculum for our older students in mathematical models that can be used to predict an ecosystem’s decline. Students will select a role in the ecosystem for the creature they will create, and will be assessed on the creature’s appropriateness to that role.

Students will learn about the diversity of Earth’s biomes and select one to study in-depth. They will learn about mathematical models that environmental scientists use to monitor the health of an eco-system, identify invasive and endangered species and predict the environment’s sustainability.

Students will study character development using literature from the sci fi genre. They will make choices about the persona, role and other relevant aspects of character development for the creature they will create, and develop a written piece describing their creature as a dynamic character. The appropriateness of their creature to these selections will be incorporated into the critique phase of the project.

Students will read science fiction books that have been made into movies and analyze how various elements differ in their representation between the two media. Students will create a written movie review, to be published on the class website, discussing the decisions screenwriters made in making the screen adaptation, and whether those changes were better or worse than the original.

Students will learn about how screen scores use music to develop a character, theme or mood, and will create snippets of their own movie music using MIDI controllers and digital music composition software.

Students will learn about visual design languages, and how Pixar and other animators use shape and color to convey particular character traits. They will design physical representations of their creatures using a variety of media, and articulate how their design decisions relate to the choices they have made throughout the project about the biome, role in the food chain and persona of their creature.

Our OT and PT sessions will integrate curricula on the musculoskelatal system to teach students the biomechanics of how animals move. They will use this information to make sure the creatures they create are anatomically correct, while also making connections to their own motor coordination, postural support and joint protection goals. Curriculum from Pixar in a Box will be integrated to actually animate their creatures, and students will critique each other’s work for how realistically the creature’s movements are for the joint structures they have created. They will then revise their work accordingly. Students will make connections between this engineering curriculum and their own physio goals and objectives.