Filemaker Pro Database turns the schoolyard into a learning environment
The school where I work happens to have beautiful grounds including a small pond stocked with fish. Being something of an outdoor person it always seemed criminal to me that students would pass by it several times a day as they made their way to class or to lunch and they never got a chance to explore the vast quantity of learning available there. I had tried on other occassions to get people hooked on it with varying degrees of success and then, with the help of technology, came up with an idea.

I had just started exploring the new features of Filemaker 7 (As I write Filemaker 8 is out) and was intrigued by the use of container fields as well as the ability to centralize tables and pass data along. I'm sure that if your a techie this may make some sense but the long and short of it is that I came up with a plan.

I took an aerial view of the grounds and overlayed a grid made up of a bunch of buttons. Clicking on a button would take you to any record associated with that spot or allow you to add something new. Using the picture container field it was now possible to click anywhere on our grounds and upload digital pictures taken right on that spot. Students would now just go out to an area and start an inventory of what they found - trees, wildflowers, insects and whatever. Armed with a set of Audobon identification books it was now possible to start taking a closer look at the things that were around us every day. With a couple of guided trips and some instruction the result was pretty much what I had wanted. Students would now go outside, start in an area and start asking that central question: "What is this?" With the guidebooks they also started to become independent and learning to observe in a way I could never teach them.  Planning was also a cinch as all that was needed was time to go out and then some at the computers to enter data. Being an inventory system other patterns could be found often raising other questions. How far away do the resident turtles lay their eggs? What are these giant wasps by the baseball field and will they hurt me (they are giant cicada killers and no, they probably won't hurt you).

We still have some holes in the database of areas we haven't covered or species that are unidentified but the progress has been good. Language Arts teachers have also used it to add stories and poems. Aside from just being able to add pictures you can also add writing or really any other computer file. Eventually, students will begin to specialize on some of the things they find and I'm also trying to document areas over time. We even have a math teacher who has taken them out and had them mark off an acre and calculate the volume of some of the buildings. In fact, the project is only limited by time and imagination.

I realize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for studying things in the outdoors and some people are actually afraid of spiders and snakes. But if they get to spend a bit more time outside the walls of the classroom and develop a curiosity for the world around them then I will feel that I've given them something more than just a passing grade.