Passion: intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Overview

A passion project is about YOU and your interests. It's an opportunity for you to pursue something that matters to you. It's a way for you to become a creative thinker, collaborator, ambitious dreamer, and confident leader. You may become a world changer! Your passion project should be something that you are intensely interested in. You will be working on this topic for several months so it should be something that you can engage in and focus on for a long time. In this phase, you will be brainstorming topics that you feel passionate about and narrowing them down to a project idea.

Your Task

Your first step is to identify your passion. You may have no idea where to start, or you may have so many ideas you don't know which one to choose. The Passion Project Brackets can help you pick a broad topic to start narrowing down to project ideas.

Once you come up with your broad topic, your next step is to create a project from that topic. Remember, you will have about 6 weeks to complete your passion project, as well as keep up with your regular schoolwork so you want to pick something challenging, but do-able. It's ok if you have to modify your project idea as you go through.

For example, the topic I chose from my brackets was gardening. Some projects on that topic might be:

• Design and build a raised garden bed to hold 16 square feet of garden space.
• Design, build, and maintain a compost system for our family garden.
• Create a blog to journal how our family grows food from our garden.
• Create an online picture book to teach elementary school children the basics of gardening.
• Create a presentation that compares major systems of home gardening, like "square foot gardening", "traditional row gardening", and "straw bale gardening".

As you can see, there are many different products I can choose within the topic. You might find that you can combine two or more of your topics from your brackets to create a project. For example:

• Gardening + Baking = Write an article about the different types of wheat used to make bread, including white wheat, red wheat, and einkorn.
• Gardening + Technology = Create video tutorials on basic gardening skills, including starting seeds, hardening off seedlings, and transplanting plants

Once you have a one to two sentence idea for your passion project, go to Google Classroom and submit your idea.

Still not sure what to do? Use the resources below for inspiration or contact your teacher to help you brainstorm some ideas.

Resources

Personal Reflection

Look back at your "Presenting Me" presentation from the start of the year and think about the topics that you thought were important.

Here are some other questions you can ask yourself to help you come up with things you are passionate about:

• What is something that bothers you? (Think BIG -- This can be something about the school, your neighborhood, Harrisonburg City, the United States, or the world.)
• If you can change one thing in the world, what would it be and why?
• What are your core beliefs?
• What impact do you want to have on your school, your community, your state or country, the world?
• What do you like to create?
• What is something that excites you?
• What is a topic that you have always wanted to learn more about or explore more deeply?
• What is something that you struggle with that you’d like to change?
• What do you want to learn about?
• What do you think is interesting?
• What can you get excited about?
• What do you wonder about?
• What breaks your heart?
• What are you good at?
• What makes you proud?
• What are your goals in life? (examples: family, travel, career)
• What do you want to do after high school?
• What do you want to do or be when you get older?
• What are your after school activities?
• What are your favorite hobbies?
• What challenges have you overcome that you can help others with?
• How would your family or friends describe you?
• What is a goal you have for this year?
• What would you like to improve about yourself?

Here are some more ways to help you reflect on your interests and find your passion project.

6 Simple Strategies to Find Your Passion - Questions and techniques to help you figure out what to do

Outside Inspiration

Check out some of these resources to get you thinking about what you want to pursue. There are links about cool people and projects, global challenges, local issues, and questions to spark your curiosity.

Academy of Achievement - "The life stories of extraordinary achievers can provide you with a roadmap of your own personal quest for excellence."

DIY - "DIY is a safe online community for kids to discover new passions, level up their skills, and meet fearless geeks just like them."

DOGO News -- Read short articles about cool things going on in the world.

Environmental Initiatives - A list of "programs and projects designed to help our environment by City of Harrisonburg (municipal operations), and... programs and projects by our community."

Global Challenges for Humanity - By the Millennium Project

Immigrant Resources - A list of resources in the Harrisonburg area for people who are new to the United States.

Make Projects - A collection of projects from Make: Magazine that can be filtered by difficulty and duration

The Tinkering Studio - "Experiments with science, art, technology, and delightful ideas."

What are the 10 biggest global challenges? - By the World Economic Forum

Wonderopolis - "Wonderopolis® [is] a place where natural curiosity and imagination lead to exploration and discovery in learners of all ages."

Young Scientist Challenge - Check out videos of students' science passion projects.