Growth of a History Mystery
Post date: Nov 16, 2014 9:58:17 PM
I've continued to work on the new History Mystery on the Death of Meriwether Lewis that I introduced here. As I said, I'll be posting updated versions as I go so you can see how the process takes shape over time. I've worked quite a bit on this already and I'd say I'm not quite half-way there in terms of creating it.
In the last few days I've completed the intro video and started converting the information into "real" looking exhibits to use during the lab. I'm fairly happy with the intro though it is definitely not to the level of some of my other ones. I think it will still do the job of hooking the kids in. I've watched another documentary and I'm seriously deep into the subject now. I also lucked/Googled into a great collection of primary source documents relating directly to the topic of Lewis' death that have helped a ton.
The only real problem I've run into is having too many great pieces of information. I spent a bit of time finding actual sections from Lewis' journal showing his ability as a marksman to help show that if he wanted to kill himself he could have easily done so in a single shot. Now I'm not even sure I'll end up using that exhibit despite it being the only one I actually have in a finished, usable state. There's just too much here!
Still, that's a good problem to have as I've had labs suffer from the opposite as well where I'm scrambling to put together an 8th (and even 7th) exhibit.
My next steps are to continue creating the exhibits and then the Investigation Guide. At that point I can start to "see" if the exhibits really create a complete picture, are too weighted in one direction, and if there is the right amount of content. I really won't know until I start to put together that guide but I really can't do it until the stations are done (or at least nearly so!)
So, here it is so far!