Ancient Chinese Inventions: Dragon's Den Project

“My purpose is to engage students in dialogue so they can see other’s points of view – in a world that needs this more than ever. I do this by sharing lessons on this site which connect students with the past and inspire critical thinking.” Dan

This is a great project-based lesson designed to introduce students to the topic of Ancient China and to the second-order concept of significance and includes graduated learning outcomes (all of you will/most of you will/some of you will).

The lesson begins with a quick starter activity where students have to guess which of four sports was not invented in China. They’re often a bit surprised by the answer (table tennis) and this leads on to a second activity in which they have to see how many inventions which originated in China they can identify (the rocket, paper, wheelbarrows - 21 are given in total). From this the class are then introduced to the idea of how historians decide what makes an event or discovery significant and they explore the acronym GREAT: G = ground-breaking, R = remembered, E = extent of importance to people at the time, A = affected the future, and T = turning point. For the main task students are given a card with three different inventions on. They need to choose one of their inventions and explain in presentation form why they felt it was so significant. The lesson concludes with a class vote on which they felt was the most important invention and why.

I’ve also thrown in an assessment rubric should you wish to turn the project into a formal assessment.

Please note this lesson was designed for high achieving Year 7 students with the ability to do their own research (some websites are given) but it also works well as a great library-based lesson depending on the resources you have in yours.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I hope your students get as much from this lesson as mine always do.