Planet Pierce Map
& Journalism Unit
& Journalism Unit
I created a curriculum to teach the girls about journalism. We begin unit by setting the stage of the fictitious Planet Pierce. We discussed the different groups of denizens residing on the planet, as well as the different zones and their socio-economic disparities. We also discussed the different types of newspapers and their differences in values in regards to accountability, profit, censorship, patriotism, and bias.
The girls then defined a list of relevant terminology for the upcoming writing assignments - accuracy, sensationalism, libel, accountability, credibility, objectivity, neutrality, bias, tabloid, and journalism.
Code of Ethics
The first writing assignment was to pretend they ran the most reputable newspaper on Planet Pierce and to write a code of ethics for their reporters.
Next they pretended they worked for a sensationalist tabloid and wrote a "code of no-ethics" for their reporters to abide by, keeping in mind their only goal was to increase profit, not accountability.
Next they pretended they worked for a sensationalist tabloid and wrote a "code of no-ethics" for their reporters to abide by, keeping in mind their only goal was to increase profit, not accountability.
Censorship
We learned about censorship by having the girls pretend to be dictators of an isolated island people. They control the newspaper and want their citizens to never leave the island which means they want their newspaper to generate fear about the mainland. They had to write a royal decree
Breaking News
Their next writing assignment was to create five different headlines for the same news story.
They were presented with the facts of the news story and then pretended to be a reporter for each of the five papers covering the catastrophe. They had to consider how each paper's priorities (profitability, credibility, zone-ism, interzone-ism) and figure out how that would influence the headlines they wrote.
We also went over examples of different words, phrases and language associated with sensationalism and patriotism.
They were presented with the facts of the news story and then pretended to be a reporter for each of the five papers covering the catastrophe. They had to consider how each paper's priorities (profitability, credibility, zone-ism, interzone-ism) and figure out how that would influence the headlines they wrote.
We also went over examples of different words, phrases and language associated with sensationalism and patriotism.
Conspiracy Theory
We learned about what conspiracy theories are and how they are formed. We then researched conspiracy theories that have have been disproved (crop circles being caused by aliens) as well as ones that ended up being true.
The girls had to write their own conspiracy theories explaining the factory blow up. They had to read their theories to each other, then the other girl would ask questions about things that didn't make sense, as a concerned skeptic. They had to continue manufacturing more and more elaborate explanations to convince their skeptical friend.
The girls had to write their own conspiracy theories explaining the factory blow up. They had to read their theories to each other, then the other girl would ask questions about things that didn't make sense, as a concerned skeptic. They had to continue manufacturing more and more elaborate explanations to convince their skeptical friend.
Map Making
The next part of our project combined math, social studies, science and art. The girls designed a map of Planet Pierce based on the information provided to them. They sketched out a rough draft then had to scale their drafts up for the poster. They calculated the areas of each zone, as well as the populations and population densities. Kenton taught them how to use R to make graphs. They created a key with circles to represent the types of denizens and distributed them based on their graphs.
They drew a compass and used stamps to label their zones.
As a bonus art project, they got to design the different denizens of their planet:
