For our Good to Better project, the three of us were assigned to take a project idea and turn it into a developed project that could serve as a performance assessment for students in Ms. Wilen's highschool Geometry class. Starting with very few parameters for the project, we were given complete creative freedom to take the project in any direction that we wanted to (while sticking to the TEKs, of course). The tiny house blueprint is to serve as an end of unit project that combines all the students have learned about areas and volumes. Since the students have a strict square footage requirement, they will have to work within a limited space to optimize their dream tiny house, including calculations along the way of each structure they include.
While the open-ended form of our mentor teacher's project proposal gave us complete creative liberty, it was also our biggest challenge in designing the project. Though there are potentially endless extensions to the tiny house project, we knew that in order to have a successful final product, we would have to narrow the scope of the assignment. In order to maintain real-world relevance but not over complicate the project, we included strict parameters that each student would have to follow while leaving room for creativity within those parameters. For example, we gave a strict square footage limit of 1000 sq ft, but within that square footage we gave the students the freedom to create a house of their own design. Through our research, we found that optimal learning occurs when the instructor provides clear structure with room for choice.
Since the tiny house blueprint is an end of unit performance assessment on area and volume, we knew that the project would need to include calculations where the students would utilize formulas they learned throughout the unit. The way we included this in the project was through the budget proposal. In addition to the blueprint, students need to give a written calculation sheet which includes a total budget proposal to build their tiny house. In order to properly calculate the budget of their design, the students need to calculate the area and volume of various elements such as the floor, roof, wall space, doors, windows, soil, etc. In this way, the project includes real world applications of the formulas taught in class because they need to know these measurements to properly budget materials.
Another reason that we wanted to include the budget proposal part of the project is because it requires students to do their own research to come up with reasonable prices for all the add-ons that they include in their home. Not only will this aspect of the project directly tie the project into real world examples, but it also teaches the students how to perform basic research skills. For example, when the student decides to add a place to sleep, they will need to make a decision on what size bed they will need. The price of the bed will vary based on the size, so they will ahve to investigate to see what is most practical for their tiny house in terms of size and cost.
The final element that we added to the project was the built-in checkpoints. Before turning in a final product, each student will have turned in one checkpoint assignment. The checkpoint will be a rough draft of the tiny house drawn on graphing paper. By breaking the project into separate steps, the teacher will be able to assess the students' progress and keep them on track. We imagine that it would have been overwhelming for the students to jump into the final project with the whole floorplan blueprint and budget proposal without first making an outline.
There were several aspects of building a house that we decided to omit when designing the tiny house project due to simplicity's sake. For example, we told the students that their roof area could be assumed to be the same as the square footage of the floor plan. This was because the project would have been much more complicated if the students needed to calculate the angles of the ideal roof and the area of all the different shapes involved. Additionally we assumed that the thickness of the walls would be negigible because including the walls in the square footage would have over complicated the blueprint drawing. In addition to omissions that we made, we also decided to standardize the cost of some common items like windows, doors, walls, flooring, and roofing. We standardized these items because we did not want the students to worry too much about the materials they would use for these mandatory features of the house.