James Bond has completed his mission! Or rather, I finished my James Bond story/lesson activity for my Moodle course. This has been a monster of a task, I had the idea for the activity almost a year ago, but it has taken me until now to distil my original ideas into a workable form and reach this stage.
I wanted to make an activity for my students to reinforce and deepen their understanding of energy, energy types, resources and transformations. I also wanted to make this a fun activity. A workbook I'd used for years had a "short story" about a secret agent and an evil Physics Professor, which involved energy transformations. I used to read this story to my students and have them shout out the energy types etc. However, I found that many students didn't understand what "secret agent" meant until I said "James Bond". Everyone knew about James Bond.
So, it seemed to make sense to try to make up a story about James Bond and put this into my Study Smart (Moodle) course. I'd already made one "lesson" as a revision exercise and though it was a long process to make the activity, it worked well and students enjoyed it.
In my story, the young (Junior) James Bond has just failed his IGCSE Physics Mock exam. "M" sends his to revise on a remote Island, where the evil Professor Heinz Stein captures James. In order to escape, James, helped by my students, has to answer many past exam questions about energy.
I've tried to make the story fun and personal to my students by including quips about the College as well as poking a little fun at myself as "Q", who is more interested in a football match on TV than in helping James. I've tried to make it a challenge to read as well as in answering the Physics questions, so that they are helped with some English as well as the Physics and I've included some language that crops up in exams and which often confuses students. I hope that I've been true to the ideals of CLIL by including language in this content lesson. At least I tried, very deliberately, to do so. I'm sure this activity is better for the attempt and just shows, once again, how much I've gained from my reading this year.
I hope the students enjoy the lesson, I've reached the stage where I need to try it out with them, ask for feedback and then reflect and act on that to improve it.
