Incredibox Brain Breaks - Curious Engagement Matters

I've tried to create a variety of different activities to engage my students as we learn more about best practices for remote learning. Some of the activities have gone very well and some not as well as I hoped. I was a bit stressed about this until Hank Thiele put this all into perspective for me. If you've not read Hank's Twitter post, I would recommend taking a quick look at Twitter here. 

Hank's tweets served as a great reminder that more than anything else, I want my students to explore new things and be curious. I want them to be curious about something, even if it isn't connected to my content. When you get right down to it my content only matters if my students are interested. Engagement in learning something new is what matters most. 
While I will continue to explore different ways to engage students in Environmental Science, I am excited to find unique ways to engage them in learning regardless of the content. This is why I am excited about an activity that I initially posted as an enrichment activity.

I have posted a few enrichment activities over the last two weeks for my students. These were not on our content schedule and I posted them because I was curious if students would engage in any of them. I really didn't think much about them after posting them until I read Hank's post and started to look at what students were doing. The one activity that stood out above the others was something I posted connected to Incredibox. 

This was not an activity that I put a lot of time into creating, but the students who engaged seemed to enjoy the experience. Here are a few of my student responses after they explored Incredibox.

"This was actually really fun to make! I did a lot of homework today and this was a nice way to have a brain break. I think that it is a fun way for people to express themselves. My creation is designed to share that no matter where we are around the world, no matter what situation we are in (a pandemic), the sun continues to rise and many people are granted the gift of another day on this amazing planet Earth." (Sarah)

"I actually really enjoyed this as well, a nice break from the usual anoying homework from every class." (Brian)

"This was way more fun than I expected it to be. Its a nice break from the busy work being assigned by other teachers." (Jack)

"This was way more fun than what I was expecting, this was a nice way to relieve stress after a whole week of finishing assignments and staying inside your house." (Om)

My student's responses to the Incredibox Brain Break has inspired me to find and create more of these types of activities. I will create some additional brain breaks, but the real challenge will be to bring some creative brain break ideas into some of my content activities. I know Incredibox alone won't get it done, but I do think it is something that I can connect to my content beyond the power of a Brain Break. I am excited to see what types of Brain Breaks and Easter Eggs I can bring to my students as we continue to dive deeper into eLearning. 

If you are curious to learn more about Incredibox or Google's Creatability Site as brain break resources, please check out this post. 

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