Reach for the Sun Teaching Strategies

Use these teaching strategies to enhance your students’ experience of the Reach for the Sun game: How realistic is the game’s representation of being a plant? Encourage students to explore this question in connection to what they learned through the related BrainPOP movie topics. After they’ve had a chance to play the game through at least once, talk about any apparent incongruities between what they already know about plant growth and what they saw represented in the game.

If students notice discrepancies, ask them to think of why the game designers may have made their choices. Is there another way they could have set up the game? This type of critical thinking is an invaluable part of the learning experience, sometimes even more so than the game play itself!

You can also prompt students with specific questions, such as:

• What are the differences between how pollination is talked about in the movie and how it is shown in the game?
• Can sunflowers pollinate themselves?
• In the game, you move the pollen to another flower. How does this happen in the real world?
• How could the game have shown pollination more accurately?
• Could the game have incorporated bees and other pollinating agents? How would this have worked?