Mystery Skype session with a Finnish school

On 24th November 2016, students of our School from classes 6 and 7 took part in a video conferencing session titled Mystery Skype. This type of Skype is a 45-60 minute critical thinking challenge that students take part in as they Skype with another group from elsewhere in the world. It is a challenge where both schools attempt to assess the other's location (country, state, city, school name) based upon a set of questions framed to help arrive at an accurate assessment. The race is to be the one to guess first!

Mystery Skype is an educational game, created by teachers. The students guess each others location using a yes or no question format and an atlas. This time thesession was organized by a teacher training School in Turku, Finland.

The purpose of this game is to create a global community of learners who develop critical thinking, listening and communication skills, scale up their Geography skills, cultivate in themselves an ability to apply resources to find information and create partners for future projects.

This is how our session unfolded: At around 1:45 pm, a class of students from an unknown country greeted us via Skype. As mentioned above, it is a guessing game, in which both the teams ask each other open-ended questions. On the basis of these questions, each is supposed to guess the other's home country. We asked a variety of questions. Some of these were as follows: Are you in the northern hemisphere? Is your country on the west of the Prime Meridian? Do you have the Black Sea in the south? Is your country a chocolate producing country? Is your language Finnish? We were also asked similar questions by them, which were: Are you a part of Asia? Are you near Indonesia? Is China your neighboring country? Are you a Muslim country? Does the famous musician Ravi Shankar belong to your country?

After about 10-15 questions, they inquired if we had any guesses to make. Our first guess was Finland, and voila, it was correct! Their guess that we were from India was correct too.

After the game, we gave a brief introduction of our School, our country and also a short cultural exchange. They also told us about their school, the subjects they study, their 45 minute study periods and 50 minute break period, which was really a surprise for us to know.

To add spice to the session, some of our students who were dressed up in ethnic costume from Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and the North-East displayed their attire. The Finnish students, greatly appreciated this. One of us also conducted a short Bharatnatyam demonstration.

The Finnish students responded with an impromptu dance presentation too and we enjoyed their attempt.

We also taught them how we greet with a namaste. In turn, we too learnt a few Finnish words. Some of these were: Hello or Hi: hei or moi Mother: iti Father: is

Finally, the session ended and our students returned to School, still perfecting the pronunciation of the new words they had learnt! Our social studies' have never been more exciting!

Ms. Sukmeen Cheema and Ms. Neha Sachdeva.