Passion Projects

Last week, we started a broad activity that we've come to know and love as "Passion Projects."It is based off of Genius Hour, which is based of off Google's 20% rule. Google requires their workers to spend 20% of their time at work working on a passion of their choice. 

I went into it extremely nervous to give the students an open ended idea. It is transforming into things I never thought would happen.

Here's how it began:

I started by asking the students to think about something they are passionate about. I had them write it on a yellow post note and stick it on the board, as shown below.

After this, I showed them this video about Genius Hour to explain a little about what I was expecting.

There were two expectations:

1. You had to have a driving question that would be the base of your research.

2. You had to have some sort of product or presentation to be able to show and discuss what you've learned with the class.

With that we started generating questions. Each student had to come up with something they wanted to learn about their passion and generate multiple questions. These had to be driving questions, which meant something they cannot simply google and be done. They must be able to do research. I talked through and had to drag a few good questions out of the students, but I was very happy with the results. For example, a student said his passion was football. One question he wanted to use was who invented football. I pulled out my phone, Googled "inventor of football" and replied, "Walter Camp. There I did your project for you." I think it was a good nonexample that kind of made everyone understand what a driving question meant. We eventually came up with great questions!

The next thing was to do research. We created journals with two pieces of cardstock and notebook paper stapled together to make a book. They got to decorate the cover however they wanted! Here is a good example of a creative cover:

(I'll take pictures of others to show the range of covers that were created)

The students had to keep their research inside these and write down anywhere they found the research to site their sources. They started research and were so into it!

The final products are starting to come together and I will be so excited to post them! 

Stay tuned!

<3

Miss Pults