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Scavanger Hunt

I teach at Douglas High School in Minden, Nevada. It’s a crowded facility, with just 10th through 12th graders on campus. We recently started busing 9^th graders over afterschool for a Careers & Technical Education course sampling. During these 4 week classes the 9^th graders get to see what type of electives are offered.  The 9^th graders get to try their hands at welding, media arts, screen printing, and culinary etc… during each 4 week course.

In Media Arts a very popular lesson involves a scavenger hunt. Our mascot is the tiger, and tiger paintings, logos, and images of all kinds adorn the school walls. Their job in this assignment is to bag as many tigers as possible. In our computer lab the students are instructed about using different search engines. This is a fun assignment that lets them recognize there's more to the Internet than Google and Wikipedia. Using 5 different search engines, the students download 1 tiger image from each of the different Internet sites.  They save the images to their file.

Now the students are instructed in the use of a digital video camera, shot composition and getting a steady camera shot. Armed with a hall pass and the camera they are told to go out and collect as many well composed and stable camera shots as possible. When the students return, I patch a camera into the TV so all the students can review the results. The student (or if it was a small group of students) who has the most well composed, steady shots of tigers wins a tiger decal for his binder or for use at home.

After importing their video into the iMovie program, they edit their shots, adding music and titles with the iMovie software.