The Great Gold Rush - History Project is an interactive computer based teaching aid and student learning resource that is ideally suited for history studies in Year 4 - First Contacts and in Year 5 - The Australian Colonies of the F-10 History Curriculum. The program is centred on a twelve minute audio-visual narrative that gives a broad overview of the great Australian gold rush of the 1850s. It is also a project resource that encourages, provides the means for and rewards, historical research. The Great Gold Rush - History Project develops students’ historical knowledge, understanding and skills in response to the key inquiry questions for Year 4 and Year 5.

The program provides opportunities for learners to develop historical understanding through key concepts including sources, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathy and significance. The audio-visual narrative places the significant events and important people in the history of the great gold rush of Australia in chronological order.

The narrative tells the story of the discovery of gold in Australia by the prospector Edward Hargraves, gold strikes in Victoria at Ballarat and Bendigo, transportation in the goldfields and the start of Cobb and Co., the mining methods used to extract the gold, the Chinese miners and the “White Australia Policy”, the government licence fee system, Peter Lalor and the Eureka Stockade.

• Develops Historical Skills Year 4 - First Contacts and Year 5 - The Australian Colonies

Research has shown that learners grapple with the past in much the same way as historians, making sense of it by analysing, ordering and linking events in storied form. The Great Gold Rush challenges students to 'do' and 'make' history in a manner that resembles the historian's craft.

The program is a unique student project resource that challenges learners to create their own version of The Great Gold Rush narrative by replacing all, or any, of the 94 drawings in the original program with images that they have either drawn or painted themselves, or those that they have searched for and chosen as replacements that best illustrate that section of the narrative.

Students can obtain the images from a number of sources, such as the project resources of the school library and the internet, or they can create their own drawings or paintings that depict their personal interpretations of what is being stated in the narrative and insert them into the project.

Chronology, Terms and Concepts

The process of selecting and inserting the images into the program in chronological order introduces learners to the use of historical methods and procedures, focusing on the interpretation of evidence and the use of narrative to construct accounts of the past, involving them as participants rather than spectators in the study of Australian history.

Analysis and Use of Sources

Historical Questions and Research

Each image of the program has an accompanying “NOTES” page, which assists learners to develop patterns of historical reasoning by encouraging them to ask questions, foster debate, use evidence to support a position and, understanding that historical and literary dimensions of students' learning are complementary, to communicating that position effectively.

Develop Historical Texts, Particularly Narratives

The NOTES page encourages students to analyse and make judgments regarding the plausibility of the script for that frame of the story, and to analyse and make judgments regarding how well the images depict what is stated in the script, and the types of evidence they represent, and to give the reasons for their assessments in writing.

Perspectives and Interpretations

The Great Gold Rush - History Project can be used by individual students, by students working together in groups, or by the entire class working on one project. The process of working on the project fosters debate among the participating students and enables them to exchange ideas, refine points of view, make and justify choices, and appreciate the ideas of others.

• Record of Achievement

The completion of the project gives students a feeling of accomplishment and builds a sense of pride in their achievement, which, due to the powerful impact that the images have on the meaning of the story and on how it is perceived by viewers, creates an audio-visual narrative that gives an interpretation of an important period in Australia’s history that is uniquely theirs.
With the unlimited site licence version of the program, students can load the program onto their personal computers and work on it from there. Then, on completion of the program, students can burn a copy to CD-ROM for a permanent record of their accomplishment.

• Teachers’ Assessment

The program also contains an assessment page where teachers can communicate with the students while they are working on the program and offer guidance and constructive criticisms if required, and where they can provide an assessment of their work on completion of the project. Each assessment session is automatically dated and saved and can be exported as a text file or printed for archival purposes.

The program has a teachers' guide, comprehensive program tutorials, student review sheets, a list of further learning activities and an interactive review that helps to reinforce student comprehension.

• Easy Program Setup and Operation

The program has easy to follow tutorials that guide you through the simple process of setting up and working on a new project. A new project is started by simply copying the Great Gold Rush folder from the CD-ROM and pasting it onto a drive of your computer. The Great Gold Rush folder contains all the functions that are required for the student’s operation and the teacher’s assessment of the project.

The replacement of the original drawings with images of the student’s own choosing is a very easy process. Students simply prepare any images that they wish to import into the program in jpeg format, and then copy and paste them into the Images folder that is provided in the program.

The names of the images will appear in the Image List in the import menu of the program and, when an image is selected a thumbnail of the image appears in the viewer window and, when the import button is clicked, the program imports the image and automatically re sizes it to fit. The imported images are saved when the program is quit and the new images will be used when the program is reopened and played.

The Great Gold Rush is the 9th in a 16 volume series of Story of Australia - History Projects that span the history of Australia, from the arrival and settlement of the ancient Aboriginal People, through to the end of World War 2.
The audio-visual narratives of the series provide a broad overview of Australian history that places the significant events and important people in history in chronological order. The narratives are useful as an introduction to, or in support of, any studies of Australian history.

The titles in the Story of Australia - History Project series are...

To load the program onto your computer, follow the simple instructions that are set out in the Great Gold Rush Tutorials, which are located in the Read Me folder that is located in the opening window of the Great Gold Rush folder.

Produced by: Adkins Productions PO Box 114 Bullsbrook Western Australia 6084
Ph & Fax: (08) 9571 1802 email: adpro44@bigpond.com web: www.admarkeducation.com