Finding the Blue Whale

To kick off Whale Week (the final few days of work using Endless Ocean in our Sealife topic) with my class I planned to discover the Blue Whale in the Nintendo Wii game.

Planning a discovery is I suppose a bit odd, but in a moment of solitary gameplay, I mean planning, in the classroom I found the Blue Whale. The children never stumbled upon it during their own play in the last few weeks. As a result I thought it would be a great way to introduce our week of work based on these amazing animals.

I explained to the class we were going to be taking a dive together as a class. I have done this infrequently over the last 6 weeks, but it is useful to work together sometimes to discover new things and to maintain the momentum.

I didn’t explain that we were looking for the Blue Whale. As I swam away from the shallow waters of the bay, the gloomy blue depths that stretched out ahead of us seemed to raise the tension. As I turned back towards the boat the sound of bubbles from the diver was overwhelmed by the children shouting, “What’s that?”, “Over there!”, “Turn around!”

Appearing before us was the Blue Whale and the children were so excited, it was the largest creature we had found in the game. Here is the Flip camera footage we shot to capture the moment as our diver swam with the whale. (If you listen closely you will notice that at school I take on my Darth Vader alter ego)

Finding the Blue Whale in Endless Ocean from Tom Barrett on Vimeo.

The children went off to work with Google Squared and find out more about the Blue and other whales.

On the BBC last week Stephen Fry was tracking down the Blue Whale in the last in the series of Last Chance to See and so we spent some time watching someone finding the Blue Whale for real.

It was a great way to start our week of work, I could never offer that experience for real – the simulated moment we shared using Endless Ocean was a lot of fun and hopefully a memorable one.