Futurist Pigeons

Anecdote

Did you know that the first drone was a pigeon? A German inventor attached cameras to spy pigeons in order to take aerial photographs during World War I.

Context

Many people say that we are currently living through a third industrial revolution characterized by numerous technological innovations. How will today’s technological devices change over the next 100 years? The students list the characteristics of an object and imagine how it might change in the future.

Activities

1. Each student chooses a technological object. After reading an article from the period or viewing a short video on the object, they make a graphic organizer. The students then deal with their object’s original characteristics and comment on how it has evolved.
2. Working in teams of two, the students imagine some technological objects of the future. With the help of an opening activity and a bank of keywords, they complete the graphic organizer, writing in it the technological innovations and discoveries they imagine happening within the next 100 years.
3. The students prepare a video report or a trailer announcing one of their innovations. It would be interesting if they took photos from a bird’s-eye view, like that of the spy pigeons of the anecdote. The videos could be presented to the other students in or outside the classroom.

Questions that students could be asked during the activity

• What stories can you tell about how your parents or grandparents used technology?
• What inventions and discoveries happened in your parents’ time?
• What current everyday objects did not exist 25, 50 or 100 years ago?
• Which everyday technological objects could you no longer do without?

Elements of the Quebec Education Program (QEP)

Elementary

• Competency 1: To interact orally in English
  • Use of functional language
  • Use of communication strategies
• Competency 2: To reinvest understanding of oral and written texts
  • Use of knowledge from texts in a reinvestment task
  • Use of reading strategies

Secondary

• Competency 1: Interacts orally in English
  • Use of functional language
  • Use of communication strategies
• Competency 2: Reinvests understanding of texts
  • Use of knowledge from texts in a reinvestment task
  • Use of reading strategies
• Competency 3: Writes and produces texts
  • Production of media texts
  • Use of communication strategies

Suggestions for activities with cultural partners

• Invite a museum-based cultural mediator to give the class a presentation on various innovations that have had an impact on Quebec history

Cultural references

• The aesthetic dimension of culture: the media
• Scientific discoveries
• Objects from daily life