Month: April 2017

Letter from the famous Paleontologist Dougal Dixon to our students

The famous Paleontologist Dougal Dixon is considered the founder of  Speculative Biology and Evolution and is the author of number of books including the World Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Creatures, After Man, Man After Man and The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution.

Especially this last book, “The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution”, was a source of inspiration for the movie we created to answer the question:

How would life on Earth be if the giant meteorite had not struck us 64 million years ago?

I contacted Mr. Dougal Dixon sending him our movie and I got the following letter in response:

Dear Anestis Vovos,
Thank you so much for your complimentary comments about my book THE NEW DINOSAURS. I am so glad that your students got so much out of it – especially as it is nearly thirty years since I wrote it.
I loved your film. Especially the part where my creations were brought to life as actual models. When I saw that first shot of the Sandle I knew that I was about to watch something special. I particularly liked the cuddly Monocorn, and the Lank with a spoon for its head. It all looks fantastic, and you all must have had a lot of fun making them. All sorts of different techniques and materials too – clay, cloth, paper…
Well done to all of you. I hope that you continue to be inspired.

Yours sincerely,
Dougal Dixon

Congratulations to all the students that participated! Their efforts did not go unnoticed!

Erasmus+ “F.I.N.D” week

Erasmus + «F.I.N.D» week

A wonderful week has ended. A week full of FIND. Our school hosted our European friends from 5 countries (Italy, Malta, Norway, Poland, the UK) from the 2nd until the 7th of April. 20 teachers and 25 students met in Patras in order to take part in the 2nd project meeting and the 2nd learning activity of the European Erasmus+ program by the title «F.I.N.D» Future Inventors ? New Discoveries which is based on STEAM teaching methods.

In the project meeting, the results of some activities of the find project that have already been completed, were analyzed. The project?s course was discussed and the next actions and transnational activities were scheduled.

In the frameworks of the learning activity, the hosted students were divided into teams. One or two students from our school?s robotic team were assigned the role of the coordinator. Each team received a scenario-problem. In order to solve the problem they had to build a robot first and then, program it to execute the commands given. Our computer lab was on fire! All the students were very excited to work on the project. They worked together and exchanged opinions. They were puzzled and forced to experiment, and in the end, everyone came out a winner. We are all so proud of them!

On Tuesday, we visited «Charilaos Trikoupis» bridge where we watched a video with information on its construction and we took a tour around the exhibition centre. After that, an engineer of ?Olympia Odos? welcomed us at Rio and gave us information on the highway of West Greece.

A conference was held on Thursday in Patras science centre. Its title was ?Let?s F.I.N.D a better future?. Students and teachers met at the science centre at 8AM.

During speeches, students were divided into teams, observed and interacted with the exhibits, chose a problem, they discussed it, solved it and presented it at the end of the conference. After these presentations, the robotics teams presented their findings.

The students who participated will be ambassadors of what they witnessed in Greece when they return to their home countries and they will communicate their experience with other students in their school.

Of course during this weekly visit, we visited the Acropolis, Delfoi and Ancient Olympia!

It was a magical experience! Thank you to everyone involved!

It was a fantastic week!

 

A movie answering our question!

In continuation of our activity “F.I.N.D.ing answers!” we explored the following question:

How would life on Earth be if the giant meteorite had not struck us 64 million years ago?

It turned out that our question was quite difficult to answer! Even scientists who have dealt with the subject do not agree on a commonly accepted answer. We discovered that there are three different answers supported by the scientific community.

Scenario 1: The dinosaurs are spared by the meteorite collision but eventually disappear due to other causes such as the decrease of global temperature or the competition from mammals, for which dinosaur eggs are an easy and rich food source. In this case though the disappearance of the dinosaurs would happen quite later. This would lead to a delay to human evolution and culture development. For this reason we have chosen to present in our film a world very similar to ancient Greece.

Scenario 2: Dinosaurs evolve! Their form and characteristics are changed to adapt to the new conditions on the planet. In this case study our source of inspiration was the amazing book “The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution” by Dougal Dixon. The evolved dinosaurs that “dino-students” present in our movie are inspired by this book.

Scenario 3: Proponents of this case, base their assumption to the fact that dinosaurs already prevailed for millions of years without major evolutionary changes up to the fall of the meteorite. Thus, in their opinion, if the meteorite did not hit the Earth then probably dinosaurs would continue to exist while maintaining approximately the same forms.

We studied our findings, we discussed how we could present them, we wrote the script for the movie, we constructed our evolved dinosaurs, we decided the  casting of the roles and then we shot our movie! You can see it here: