Project Kickoff and Rubric
Project Partner Evaluation Form
Half-Semester Student Projects Focused on Complex Problems
Overview
This resource is a step-by-step guide to mentoring students through a half-semester project focused on a complex social or environmental issue. Based on the project portion of my course, Designing the Future World, students are assisted to select a topic important to them and develop a proposed intervention which they present at an open house at the end of the semester.
Overview
This resource is a step-by-step guide to mentoring students through a half-semester project focused on a complex social or environmental issue. Based on the project portion of my course, Designing the Future World, students are assisted to select a topic important to them and develop a proposed intervention which they present at an open house at the end of the semester.
Discipline
This project can be used in many discipline-based courses. It is perhaps best suited for problem- and project-based learning and interdisciplinary approaches. I'm a social scientist and have used it for interdisciplinary courses focused on complex social and environmental problems.
Learning Objectives
Identify complex problems ("wicked problems") with social and environmental significance, and describe how these problems might be remediated by purposeful human design activity.
Use “Design Thinking” and critical thinking skills to select a complex problem of social and/or environmental significance and plan a design approach to the selected problem.
Following one of the design processes we have studied, design and execute a “concept prototype” for a device or policy that addresses the complex problem you have selected.
Reflect on what you have read, discussed, and done in the course, and how it may contribute to shaping your future behavior, career path, and/or ethical commitments.
Class size range
This half semester mentored project is attention intensive for the instructor (but also really fun and interesting). I have had a maximum of 24 students per class (and students work in pairs, so 12 projects). Unless the instructor has good teaching assistants I would say that is a maximum because of the amount of coaching and feedback necessary.
Time needed
I begin this process at the half-semester mark, and from then on, about half of all class meeting time each week is devoted to the project. Students are reporting weekly either to the whole class or in brief meetings with the instructor to get feedback and shape their project.
Materials Needed
- Display boards for the final meeting of the semester, during which students display their project, including a poster-style explanation of the problem they are addressing and their proposed intervention.
- Each two-student team is also required to create a "concept prototype" to illustrate the intervention they propose. Since each artifact will be unique to the students creating it and their intentions, there is no set list of materials. I taught in a room with access to lots of craft materials, but this is not strictly necessary. Students can obtain their own materials; I started offering $20 to each team with a demonstrated need to purchase supplies, which can be useful in a setting with low income students.
- One way to add meaning to the challenge of making an artifact, which is a required part of the assignment, would be to require student to use scrap and recycled materials wherever possible, teaching an additional lesson in sustainability.
Lesson Instructions
This week-by-week breakdown assumes a 13 or 14 week semester. You can either start earlier if your semester is shorter, or compress the weeks.
Week 1. Introduction to the project. Describe the half-semester project. Give students a handout with the assignment and the rubric you will use to evaluate the project. Give students 2 minutes to think about what important social, economic, environmental, etc issue they would be interested in working on--either one we have studied or something else they care about. Tell them they will have time to make a final decision in the coming week or even two, so no absolute commitment is needed today. Find partners. I had students work in pairs. This worked well. It meant the work was not the product of one mind alone (which improved it) and reduced the danger of slacking off by a team member. To assist with forming teams I ran a quick "Speed Dating" exercise (although I avoided calling it that). All the students stood up and found someone in the room to talk to (preferably someone they didn't know already). They had one minute to tell their partner what they were interested in as a project topic, then one minute to listen to their partner's ideas. Then they found another partner. I repeated this 3 or 4 times. If there was an odd number of students in the class I partnered with one student, or sometimes I allowed one group of 3. Some students will want to work with their friends, roommates, etc and I do allow this, but I also encourage them to be openminded and find people who share their interests. Form teams. Next I hand out the assignment for the coming week, which asks students to report on who is on their team, and how they have made plans to stay in touch. It also asks them to list four topics that are of greatest interest to them, why they are interested, and some very preliminary thoughts about what they might do to address each topic. I also hand out a copy of the form I will ask them to fill out at the end of the course, evaluating their partner, so that they will have a sense of what I expect and that I will want to know how the partnership went. After all of this, I leave the last 15 minutes or so of the class for them to talk among themselves and try to form partnerships. If they have successfully found a partner, they report this to me before leaving. Anyone who has not found a partner by the end of class (including anyone who is absent) is assigned a partner by me.
Week 2. Meeting with each team. The project portion of this class session is devoted to individual meetings with each team. Teams sign up for 5 minute sessions of feedback from me. When not meeting with me, students work with their partners to further develop and research their ideas. When meeting with a team, I look at the homework (their thoughts and plans for the project) and give them feedback. I ask if they have a favorite topic. Some topics and approaches fit far better with this project than others; for example highly technical projects (eg. improved storage of nuclear waste) are not a good fit. Usually I will have to urge the pair to narrow down and become much more specific (instead of "ending homelessness," finding a particular need of the local homeless population and trying to address it). Occasionally the team has fixated on a particular solution already and I urge them to broaden their thinking, especially if the idea seems infeasible or inappropriate. Most of the time, though, it's narrowing the focus that is needed,
Week 3. Two minute slide shows. The assignment for today, for each team, is to present a two minute slide show about their project to the class. I stress that they are presenting work-in-progress and that they are not bound by what they present, but that it's a chance to show where they are in the process and get feedback from their fellow students and from me. Each team is tasked with addressing the following questions in their slide show:
What is the “wicked problem” or need you have selected to address?
Why is this problem important?
What relevant information have your gathered so far? (Be sure to include sources/references in small type on your slide.) What additional information do you hope to collect?
What sort of project artifact are you currently planning to create? Describe and/or show an illustration.
What sorts of information do you plan to include on your project display board?
Last week, teams met with me privately; this week they go public by presenting to their fellow students. Students seem to enjoy knowing what others are working on and following their evolution; occasionally two teams are working on similar things and I can help guide them to different aspects of the same topic so that they are not working on precisely the same problem.
If there is time left over, I do a fun Playfulness exercise (the reading assignment for this week, from the Bernstein and Bernstein book Sparks of Genius, is on playfulness in creativity and design). I invite students to get out Lego, modeling clay, craft materials, etc from the cupboards and work on answering the question: "What if your project were a map, a son, a dance, a pantomime (Charades), a toy, a poem, a quiz show, or a pun? What would it look/sound like?"
Week 4. Project work session. This class is dedicated to students working with their partner on their project, plus brief 5 minute consultations with me, as in Week 2. The project deliverables are 1) a display board/poster explaining the problem they selected and the intervention they are proposing, 2) an artifact that is either a concept prototype of a device, or some other interactive representation (a quiz that visitors can take, for example), and 3) an "elevator pitch" that they can recite at the end-of-semester open house to tell visitors succinctly what their project is about. At this class they get blank display boards and start mocking up what their boards will look like and what text they will use. I give them handouts about the design process and about what makes for a good display board (large type, color, some images). Once again teams sign up on the whiteboard for a 5 minute meeting with me, but most of their time is spent working together on aspects of their project.
Week 5. Project work session. The homework for today is to bring a printed draft of the text and images the teams plan to use on their display boards, and evidence of significant progress on their artifact. Not all students have access to color printing, so some of this class is devoted to giving them the opportunity, with the printer in the classroom, to print the final version of their display board text (which they can then glue to the display board). I spend my time reading their drafts and circulating as they work, to answer questions and give feedback. This is the final in-class work opportunity before student present a substantially finished project to their fellow students next week.
Week 6. In class project presentation. Each team in turn presents their project to their fellow students. Due today was a script for an "elevator pitch," a 60-second monologue about the problem and their team's approach to improving the situation they have been researching. Unlike the assignments in previous weeks, which both team members have collaborated on and submitted jointly, each person writes their own elevator pitch in their own voice, emphasizing the things they find most important. I don't require students to memorize or recite their pitch verbatim--I just want them to have thought through what they most want to say in the brief time they have. When presenting today, each student speaks for 60 to 90 seconds. I tell them not to worry about overlap between what they say and what their partner says. The purpose of this exercise is to prepare them for next week's open house, when they and their partner might speak separately to visitors. This also gives them a "preliminary deadline" for project completion, so that they don't leave everything until the last minute. After all teams have presented, students can use any time left to put finishing touches on their project. Ideally, by the end of class all projects will be complete and ready for next week's open house.
Week 7. Open House. The class open house is a public event, which I publicize with posters and announcements in the university newsletter. I tell students to invite their friends and family (and a few actually do). When a student entrepreneurship program was created on campus, I started inviting the three staff people from the program. They were among the best visitors, because they really took time giving feedback for each project, and they also encouraged the teams to continue their work past the end of the course, using the resources of the entrepreneurship program. The open house was almost universally loved by the students--even those who really didn't want to participate discovered how much they had accomplished when they saw the interest their project attracted from visitors.
Designing the Future World was my favorite course to teach, and the project was my favorite part of the course. Generally, students loved being able to pursue what they were interested in and being able to shape the project in the way they wanted, with guidance from me to make sure they didn't go off the rails. Each year a few students would volunteer that this was their favorite course, either this semester or during their whole college career. I am willing to bet that they remembered the course and the project longer than they remembered most other academic things from college, in part because they were thinking with things and making something original to them.