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I still remember the first project that I assigned my students...can you get a balloon rocket to run along a string from one side of my room to the other? Oh, and you need to beat the other students in the class! And, so it began...my love for all things project based. You just can not get your students to have the conversations that you can when it comes to these projects. I have created, edited, tried quite a variety of these projects in my career and I think they are an integral part of my curriculum. This is open ended inquiry at its finest...the only difference is that, in many cases, there is no report requirement at the end...just the completed project. From the parachute design contest to the balloon rockets to the walking on eggs, I have tried so many of these over the years that I can not even find the documents for many of them anymore. One of the easiest ones that I do (and do not have a write up for) is my tower contest. Given a sheet of paper and 20-30 cm of scotch tape, make a free standing tower as tall as possible. The designs and creativity are quite impressive, until the one group gets it "working" and then a lot of those wandering eyes go to work...still, it takes a lot of patience and skill to come up with a successful tower. How do I grade this? Simple...one cm of height equals one point of grade. Most of the towers will reach 90 plus centimeters before the class period is over. A variation on this is to use 20 pieces of linguini and masking tape...same goal. No matter the contest, no matter the challenge...a lot of good physics and a lot of good student collaboration will happen!
These, of course, are not my students, but I just LOVE this photograph that I found on the web. Children of ALL ages can do these projects...just look at these kids! You can not tell me that there is not value in doing this type of work in your classroom...there is some serious thinking and collaborating going on in that photo! You can also see that you can modify any project to fit the needs of your students...here the students are using newspaper to build their structures. I have limited the amount of paper and tape, I have made them "purchase" materials, and I have had it so they have had to support a mass...whatever I feel like doing, I give it a shot! It is just good physics fun!
I have broken this section into two parts: physics contests and physics challenges. The physics contests require that the students actually compete against one another to determine the best project and their respective grades are based on their order of finish. I make the scaling of the grades such that as long as the group was successful the earned grade, regardless of order of finish, will put them in the B or better range. The physics challenges are projects that requires the student groups to successfully complete a challenge and their grade is dependent on how successfully they do just that. Again, my goal with all of these projects is to allow the students to have fun, while being challenged, and to earn a reasonably good grade. I often add in an extra credit piece just to motivate my students that much more to try and do their best and to not give up on their creativity. Due to time constraints, many of my projects are done at home by the student over the course of a marking period. I monitor their progress through an occasional verbal check in or through the use of GoogleDocs. I usually require some journal from the students to describe what was done during the build and to verify that all the students were engaged in the process.
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