Handouts are available at the bottom of the page.

Video Transcript

Hi Science Teachers,

Welcome to Science Teacher Summer School, Episode 7.

I’m Kent Lui, and something you may not know about me is that for my first teaching contract, I taught physics 11, planning 10, esl socials studies, esl English, and science 8. That was my “dog’s breakfast” of a schedule. Now, let’s get to work.

Have you ever assigned a project that used some sort of technology – for example, powerpoint, prezi, lego mindstorms, or maybe even 3d printing – sent students to work on it, and then get back something that’s complete garbage? Perhaps, students spent a bunch of time putting together the bells and whistles of their project – making it look cool – but didn’t spend enough time actually fulfilling the core learning objectives. My wife and I call that “polishing a turd.” Like when a student puts in a whole bunch of electronic dance music, animation and graphics into their powerpoint which was basically a cut-and-paste job of Wikipedia. This is the one mistake a lot of students and teachers make: we’re so enamored by the tech that the project ends up being about the tech – when, in fact, the tech is only supposed to be the means through which students demonstrate their learning.

How do we make sure projects that use tech don’t end up being all about the tech?

What I do is I get students to focus on the process as opposed to their final product. I literally give more marks in a project for students to document their process and their thinking than for the final product. This is how it needs to be for students to value the process over the product – by assigning a proportionate amount of marks to it. This is no different from writing drafts for an essay. But, imagine in an essay, instead of your mark being determined by the final essay, your mark represents what you’ve learned on your way to producing the final version of your essay.

For example, I used to use one of these – a 3d printer – in my science class to build models and parts for a bridge project. But the problem with 3d printing is that everyone just wants to print something cool. And that’s what it will become if we don’t put some constraints on it. Kids will just want to print off cool stuff they saw on the internet or they’ll want to slap something together quickly to get it printed off. What I did for this project is that I made it mandatory for students to hand in detailed sketches of what they were going to print off. Then we had to sit down and discuss their design – and this is where I question what they’ve designed and what they’ve produced so far. Then, I get students to redo their designs to incorporate any feedback. This may happen 2 or 3 times. Then, after we’ve gone through their work a few times, I allow them to 3d print. By this time, I’ve been able to see all they’ve learned through our discussions. And, the final printed piece may be just a nice capstone to the project. If this were a project out of 40 marks, I may give 10 marks each to the 3 rounds of discussion and then give 10 marks for the final printed object. This way, students can see that the project really isn’t about the tech.

And, if you think about it, this could be applied to powerpoint presentations as well. Instead of having students just make up some slides and present, make it mandatory for groups to sit down and discuss the contents of their presentation before they present. This way, students won’t just be polishing a turd.

That’s all the time we have for this episode. Please leave your questions in the comments section below. Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about why we need to turn our students into geeks in our classroom. You don’t want to miss it.

Thanks for watching. And, remember to science everywhere everyday.

Resources

Handout(s): Handout – Project Guide

Our resources are free. We aren’t collecting emails for our resources. However, it would help us out if you liked us on our Facebook page and subscribed to our Youtube Channel. Thanks!