Hi-tech lab offers a shadowy glimpse of our low-tech past

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Kyrene Middle School’s new LTEC Lab, which combines state-of-the-art technology and software with hands-on projects, was converted into a dark cave billowing with mist as students explored prehistoric art and ancient peoples during a recent sixth-grade social studies project.

The project, assisted by Kyrene tech specialist and LTEC Lab facilitator Nick Poveromo, combines technology with engaging assignments, allowing students to explore history in a new and unique form.

“This LTEC room is new for me this year. It’s our first shot at trying to change the learning environment,” he said. “So, I think it’s much more engaging, compared to just a regular classroom.”

Sixth-grade teachers Amanda Berrelleza, Ann Peterson, Laurie Martinez and Mary Bittel worked together to make the project a successful cave adventure for students.

With flashlights in hand, kids navigated through the cave, exploring various forms of replicated ancient illustrations, working with multimedia to combine history, science, language arts, writing and art.

“We have cave-art paintings that are pretty accurately drawn to what was actually found in a lot of well-known, ancient caves,” Poveromo said.

“Kids are really interested in the geology of it, too.”

The students used charcoal, chalk and pastels to draw their own cave art, which were hung up on the room’s cardboard paper walls that resembled the textured surface found inside a cavern.

“Kids are getting some background, learning about early man; that’s all being studied in the classroom, and they might use multimedia for it, as well as partial textbook content, but this is the learning experience of making their own cave art,” said Poveromo, who worked at KMS for 12 years.

“The big tie-in is the technology aspect.”

While sixth-graders sketched animals and explored geological pieces found in ancient caverns, others used laptops to explore some of the most famous ancient caves.

“They also have the real, three-dimensional, Flash enabled site on the Lascaux cavemen, which is probably the world’s most famous archeological site,” Poveromo said. “They can also do a virtual dig using computers, in which students find artifacts within a map section; it’s laid out like a grid as an archeologist would do.”

The Lascaux cave formation, located in southwestern France, is best known for its Paleolithic cave paintings, he said, where paintings of animals and abstract designs were discovered.

Kids piloted through actual 3D images of the cave, making it much more than a computer-generated simulation, he said.

There was also a separate section of laptops for students to write about their cave art experience, creating background stories for their drawings.

“The level of engagement is very impressive, and that’s what we want to create with this LTEC room,” Poveromo said.

“We want LTEC to be the classroom that offers all these possibilities that are not available to most teachers in their regular classroom – creating cave art in a cave is a lot better than just sitting at a desk and sketching things out.”

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