Passive Transform History lessons for middle school.

Year 8 are studying why the factory out-produced the home workshop, and what that did to work. For a twenty-minute shift the class makes eight-page booklets from A4 sheets: half the tables as craft workers who each fold, staple, trim, number and rule every booklet themselves, the rest as lines of five in which each student does one step and passes the work on. Everyone is at a station, so nobody is free to observe. A school tablet on a tall stand looks down on one craft table and one line, framed to show hands, work and a countdown timer but no faces, and records in time-lapse; waiting booklets lie in a row beside each station so they can be counted from above. The teacher plays the shift back in under a minute, then again, pausing at every two-minute mark while students record the queue at each station and the number of idle hands. They plot the queue at the slowest station, hear Adam Smith's 1776 account of ten men making upwards of 48,000 pins a day, and write what the line gained and what its workers lost. The footage is deleted after the lesson.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are studying the Great Plague of 1665 and how Londoners lived through it. The teacher has typed the weekly plague deaths from the Bills of Mortality into a short Sonic Pi program that plays one bar per week, with a quiet click for every hundred deaths and a low bell to mark the start of each month. The class listens once with eyes closed: near silence through May, when weekly plague deaths were well under a hundred, the first clicks in June, a thickening through July and August, a dense rattle in mid-September, when a single week recorded over 7,000 plague deaths, then a thinning through the winter. On the second playing the teacher shows the month names on the board as they pass, and students mark on a timeline in their books where the sound changed fastest. They finish by reading three entries from Samuel Pepys's diary, from June, August and September, and placing each on their timeline with a sentence on what Pepys knew at that moment and what he could not yet know.

Tools: Sonic Pi Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 8 are studying Columbus's voyages and what the first encounters meant for the Taíno. The teacher tells the story of the fourth voyage: Columbus stranded on Jamaica in 1503 with his ships rotting, and the Taíno at St Ann's Bay growing tired of feeding his crew. The teacher then sets Stellarium on the board to that bay on the evening of 29 February 1504 and runs time forward as the sun sets, so the class watches the Moon come up in the east with Earth's shadow already across it, then turn a dull red. Students read the extract from Ferdinand Columbus's biography of his father, which says Columbus warned the caciques that God would darken the Moon as a sign of anger; the teacher explains that historians link his knowledge of the date to the astronomical almanac he carried. The lesson ends with students writing a judgement on what the episode shows about the power European knowledge gave the newcomers, and on how far a son's account of his father can be trusted.

Tools: Stellarium Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 are weighing up whether the Anglo-German naval race made war more likely. Before the lesson the teacher took the commissioning date of every British and German dreadnought battleship and battlecruiser, from HMS Dreadnought in December 1906 to August 1914, from published ship lists and typed them into a short Sonic Pi program that plays one bar per month: a high bell for each British ship and a low bell for each German one. The class listens once with eyes closed: nearly three years of British bells alone, the first low bell in October 1909 when SMS Nassau entered service, then both voices quickening, with the high voice always ahead. On the second playing the teacher shows the years on the board and stops at spring 1909, when the naval scare and the cry of 'We want eight and we won't wait' swept Britain, and asks what the class has heard from Germany by that point. Students finish by writing a paragraph on whether British fear in 1909 rested on ships Germany had or ships it was expected to build, and what that says about the naval race as a cause of war.

Tools: Sonic Pi Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 9 have studied why the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 and why it came down in November 1989. The teacher first shows a 1980s photograph of the wall and its death strip at Potsdamer Platz, then opens the Timelapse layer in Google Earth on the board and centres it on the same area between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz. At this resolution the wall itself cannot be seen, and the teacher says so, but the large patch of open ground where the border cut through what had been one of Europe's busiest squares shows against the surrounding blocks in the 1980s frames, which the teacher checked before the lesson. Students watch that gap survive the first years after 1989, then turn into building sites and fill with new blocks through the 1990s, until by the 2000s the line of the old border is hard to pick out. The teacher replays and pauses on 1988, 1995 and 2005, and students answer the enquiry question 'How long did the division of Berlin stay visible after the wall fell?' in their books, citing the years they have seen.

Tools: Google Earth Nine ideas for your own version in Generate