Example PBL: 7th Grade Dinosaur Project

Premise:

While exploring evolution and ecology students in 7th grade take a look at how dinosaurs have evolved over time in our understanding and in pop culture. In previous years they've created scale models of dinosaurs and close-up "puppets" to create either fiction or non-fiction movies about them. This year in the second semester of the 2022-23 school year, we're taking this a bit further. In art, students will create lifelike sculptures of their chosen dino and use them to create an animation like a real movie animator would to show how they may have interacted with each other and their environment. Videography class will have the students taking key scenes from the Jurassic Park series of movies and then creating scripts and stop-motion movies that recreate those scenes from the dinosaur's perspective. We've added science research this year, and they will study how dinosaurs have moved using computer modeling like paleontologists and then use that information to analyze whether they were accurately portrayed in movies like Jurassic Park. On top of that, they'll be participating in a simulated dig site that is full of actual dinosaur bones from the Hell Creek formation and work with a paleontologist to learn how these fossil finds are discovered, recorded, and preserved for scientific study(and for them to keep). In the 2023-24 school year, we'll be adding coding back to the project and students will use robotic arms to create their own animatronic dinosaur by creating the wrapping for the robot and then studying how the dinosaur may have moved by looking at existing creatures and programming it accordingly.