Mystery Science is largely an online curriculum with a heavy focus on video content, but below are a few ideas to work with students who don't currently have access to reliable high-speed internet.
- Offline Activities: Many of the activities for Mystery Science units can be done offline. We have put together a helpful list that describes many of our offline activities here.
- Transcript Adaptations: All of our lessons have full transcripts in English and Spanish available. Teachers can coordinate with parents to adapt these transcripts for at-home use. This can be achieved in a number of ways; one of them is adding pictures or screenshots to the transcripts to help guide the lesson. Transcripts can be found under "Extend this lesson" on the right column of each lesson. This would require some amount of coordination and planning, but it has proven to be successful for specific cases.
- Hot Spot: It is possible for students to access student links by using a parent's cell phone as a hot spot (tethering). The ability to do this will vary by cellphone provider, but this option is usually available or can be enabled by simply calling your provider.
- Video Caching: This is an option that also takes some prep and work-around, but we have a feature that allows you to save a cached version of the lesson to your browser. Parents would need to find a reliable connection (some public parks, libraries, coffee shops, and others have free wifi for the public), then download the cache version to their browser. The video will then be temporarily available to watch without an internet connection on the same device. You can learn more about video caching here.
We know these suggestions are not perfect solutions to this issue, and although we don't have a better option at the moment, our team is working really hard to come up with new ideas for a better alternative in the future.