Mission: Rainforest

In this activity students adopt the role of a small team of undercover environmentalists, deep in a tropical rainforest, on a mission to investigate and expose the illegal activities being carried out by a multinational logging organisation that is destroying the planet.

Rainforest involves four lessons:

• Establishing base camp
• Logging activity
• Sustainability
• Escape.

The activity includes an introduction, four lesson plans, video and audio clips, slides, resource sheets presenting the challenges, and some possible solutions. Each lesson involves a separate mission leading to non-routine problems for students to solve. The problems, some of which are open-ended, are designed to promote discussion, reasoning and thinking skills.

In solving the problems, students will need to use a range of process skills: planning and organising, exploring and discovering relationships, analysing and reasoning, representing and interpreting, and reflecting and communicating. In particular, students will need to be able to calculate with decimals and percentages; find perimeters, areas and volumes and convert between units of measurement; use coordinates, find the midpoint of a line segment, make and interpret scale drawings and draw simple plans and elevations.

To use this resource:

• download the zip file

• extract all of the files

• run the start file