Students identify and/or place events, actions, or other elements on a physical or digital timeline.
This method helps students map events, visualise time perspectives, create overviews, and identify patterns.
Define—or have students decide—what they want to explore using a timeline.
This could be historical events, a product’s lifecycle, a person’s life story, a user’s experience, or a novel’s plot progression.
Distribute physical or digital cards with events, actions, or other items for students to place on the timeline — or let students find and choose what they want to add themselves.
Students arrange the events, actions, etc., in order on a physical or digital timeline. They can add dates, quotes, facts, or other relevant details.
Students reflect on, for example:
How do the events influence each other?
Are there unexpected connections or trends?
What can we learn from the development?
Students can create an online timeline where they add videos, articles, or images.
Using the Hypothesis Development method, they can make predictions about future developments, or with the Forecasting method, extrapolate trends from the timeline.
Students can compare multiple timelines (e.g., two countries, two technologies, or two historical periods).
They can add colour codes to show connections between events or use the Category Development method to identify relevant categories and patterns.
Students can also create a “living timeline” by physically lining up in chronological order and presenting their assigned events.
As a conclusion, the class can discuss how different interpretations of the sequence might arise and what causes these differences.
| Investigate |
Physical timeline (e.g., on large paper or string on the floor)
Digital timeline (e.g., in Padlet, Miro, or Jamboard)
Cards with events, actions, or data