Online Collaborative Project-Based Learning

Who would have thought it would take a global pandemic and an economic crisis to see how we can re-imagine our future on the planet? Our liability could become our opportunity. Necessity is the mother of invention. As the old ways of doing things have broken down under the pressure of a global crisis, we become mindful of new ways of doing things breaking through.

In this project, students are going to describe how the pandemic has impacted their personal life and the entire community and society's lives. They will also identify the preventative measures that people need to follow in order to avoid being infected.

Teams of four students (recommended) will then each assume one of the entities in the project: School, or Restaurants, or Flying, or Entertainment to research and write about the problems they are facing and the solutions they came up with to solve them at present. They will then come up with their own ideas of how to redesign buildings and interior arrangements of these entities to preempt continuous infection or other pandemics that will show up in the future. Student will also come up with suggestions and guidelines for entity specific routines to make sure that people avoid infection and feel safe to come.

Students will research a topic of their choice based on an interest-­‐directed area. They will then learn about the history of their chosen field and its current development. They will also report their personal involvement with the topic and its significance. Finally, they will conduct research to see how they can turn their interest in the field into a long term career goal. Each student’s final product will include a creative presentation of the student’s work.

Goals:

• Understand the relationship between personal interests and society
• Become familiar with various career and study opportunities related to interests
• Learn about the purpose of their field of study within society
• Develop the essential skills of logical thinking, creative problem solving, intellectual risk taking, and communication
• Explore unanswered questions and generate new questions
• Generate new ideas
• Build and apply critical thinking skills

In this project, students will investigate one of the biggest problems the world is faced with - Poverty, which is also the UN's sustainability goal #1.

Students will start by providing facts and figures about the state of poverty either in the world or in their community. They will provide the main causes for it and the progress that was made in the last two year to eradicate it. Students will then focus on the targets for achieving the 'No Poverty' goal. They will analyze a goal in action by looking at its inherent problems, the potential it presents and the solutions for achieving this goal.

Students will then research existing interventions that are going on to tackle this problem and find out in what ways they can get involved and contribute to helping out the situation. After listing the various help options that they can be part of, students will describe a detailed help plan they intend to follow to eradicate poverty. They will finish this activity by analyzing the impact that their actions had on the population they served and provide real life images of the experience.

In this project, students  will turn their classrooms into production studios by producing a podcast, three to 12 minutes long. Students will do this by using a smartphone and a computer, with easily available software. 

Students will start by learning about podcasts. They will then move on to brainstorm about different topics and choose one topic to focus on. Once they have a topic, they will plan the story, learn all about sounds and how to record them and how to interview other people. 

Finally, they will come up with a podcast script and record multiple versions of their podcast, while getting feedback from peers for a final podcast version that they will publish.

Can a perfectly fair election produce an outcome that nobody likes? When voting, we often think about the candidates or ideas in the election, but we rarely consider how a collective decision gets made.

In this project, students will vote on the type of hamburger they prefer to eat and then use the plurality system to calculate the outcome of the vote. Students will be able to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of this voting method and see how it can distort the voters’ real choices.

In the last few months the world has changed abruptly and people locked down in their countries are following daily statistics of how many people fell ill with the coronavirus and how many of those died. Checking statistics obsessively takes up a lot of our time because it has implications on our chances to get back to normal again.

In this project, students will explore statistical graphs in general and learn to look and understand the COVID-19 statistics and how to interpret the data correctly.

Students will use this book report template to describe a book they are reading. They will ask and respond to questions, describe the main characters, look into the background of the story and describe the plot as a series of actions focusing on the rising and falling action events and the climax.

Students will also come up with inferences and learn to analyze conclusions and map the sequence of actions that lead to conflicts. Students will also create a vocabulary of the important words in the story.

In this project, students will read and analyze O. Henry's ‘Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen’ and Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Want painting. To complement the analysis of Freedom from Want, students will also listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous State of the Union address from 1941 about the four essential freedoms, which was the inspiration for Norman Rockwell's freedom paintings. Students will analyze each literary form and compare and contrast their meaning.

In this project, students develop an understanding of what it means to be healthy by examining how a healthy body functions. Students learn what calorie intake they need to maintain their basal metabolic rate, learn about governmental recommendations for nutrition over time, examine and evaluate media messages related to health, begin logging their own food intake and exercise.

This is a project that students can do at home. Cooking outside while camping can be a lot of fun. Students can directly use solar power to cook food. This can be done using a solar oven, which is a low-cost, ecologically-friendly technology. In this science activity, students will build their very own simple solar oven out of a pizza box to gather the sun's rays. They will record the building process and will investigate how the different parts of the solar oven work.

In this project, students are going to compare and contrast shapes to each other, by identifying their characteristics and learning to calculate their perimeter and area. 

Students will use the component tool to come up with all the characteristics of a certain shape and use the events tool to describe the steps of calculating the shape's perimeter and area.

Students will reuse the information they gathered to compare and contrast all shapes to each other along the lines of their sides, angles, interior and exterior angles, perimeter and area.

Finally, students will use social media terminology, to create the profile of one shape they pick.

In this project, students will embark on solving a problem in society that they really care about. They will identify the problem, look at its scope, the population that is affected by it, the causes that led to it and possible solutions. Students will then come up with an action plan detailing how to get involved and document their experience making a difference.