Junior Science 1 provides teachers with a bank of over 150 interactive activities that have been designed to address objectives from the UK National Curriculum.
The theme is ‘Life and Living Processes and topics include: Life Processes, Humans and Other Animals, Green Plants, Variation and Classification, and Living Things and their environment. Each topic has a list of tasks that can be assigned to individual students. There is also a reporting section where you can get information about the tasks that individual students have done.
When first using the software, students can select their name from a list if the teacher has created a list or they can create a new name. This means that teachers don’t have to create classes and nominate activities for their students to be able to sue the software.
I sampled the Life Processes topic and the first task required me to drag words into one of two columns.
In the second task I had to click in a box to enter or remove a tick and in the third task I had to read a short paragraph and answer a multiple choice question about it.
The final task I looked out required me to drag between two boxes to match processes.
The image below shows the student report for the tasks I did.
SUMMARY
Software to promote learning of science content. Teachers can create student accounts and select the activities that they want done. Student reports can then be viewed.
Recommended for Years 3-7.
Pros: a wide variety of tasks that teachers can select from. Most tasks are quite short. Easy to navigate and the screen is not cluttered.
While not in any ways brilliant, it would be better than no science at all. Boys who had an interest in science could find their own learning path through the software.
Cons: you’d need to work through the topic tasks in order to make sure that students had the knowledge to complete the tasks set. Not all tasks taught – some tasks assessed relying on prior knowledge.
Would get boring after a while.
