Fifth graders at Laburnum Elementary have been learning about the layers of the Earth in Science (SOL5.7d), so today students in Ms. Johnson’s class created 3-D models of the Earth using CoSpaces. First, I set up a free classroom account, and the students logged in with a code. Usually, the first thing you do in CoSpaces is click the Environment button at the bottom and chose an environment. We decided to use the default environment for this project to save time. Then, we clicked on Library button and chose the Build tab to find the half-sphere shape. We added that to our scene, and I showed them how to use the pop-up tools to raise the shape and rotate it. Right-clicking on the shape brings up a menu that we used to change the color of the shape. Since this represented the crust, we also added a label using the right-click menu. Then, we duplicated the shape, shrunk it a bit, recolored it, and labeled this new half-sphere as the mantle. Some chose to try to push the shape into the crust, while others left theirs out. The students continued in this way, adding the rest of the layers of the Earth. Finally, we chose a character from the characters library to add to the scene. The characters can be customized and given speech bubbles by right-clicking on them. CoSpaces has a coding component as well, but we didn’t have time to code during this lesson. We shared our projects in Schoology, and you can see some student examples here.
