The project that was worth no credits

This year I have been working with a student as part of the independent project at school. I have been a guide to his project.

He aim was to help develop fitness using the point's parks and reserves.

The project looked at the current ideas of the powerade challenge, parkrun and apps on a phone.

It is a pretty great system he has come up with and is looking at how to develop this to an actual community project as part of next year.

But that is not what this blog post is around.

It is the learning, when this project started, he didn't want any credits from it, it was more about the learning and him wanting to develop something for the community. He is a year 12 student currently sitting NCEA Level 2. He already had the plan for what he was wanting to study this year, and what credits would fill the pieces, he already had worked on part of his level 2 pathway at year 11.

During the year he was encouraged to look outside the box, brightsparks was identified and the requirements looked at. A video outlining his project.

As part of the independent project requirements, a dragons den were presented the projects and those that were allowed to develop an individual project got the opportunity, an individual log was required that showed some form of planning and reflection, he was encouraged to take photos along the way to show his development and ideas. Out of this fell the views and perspectives social science standard.

The project was entered for Brightsparks, and he is now a finalist, in the engineering and software categories.
Update to this from brightsparks; 3rd place senior software, 3rd place senior engineering, 1st place senior best design concept.

A week before externals were to be sent away we were discussing the project, technology scholarship was talked about, would he be able to put his work together to meet the requirements. A late entry and the challenge was on.
He managed to complete the work and the timelines. We wait to see what the outcome will be.

After the submission, I started sharing the idea and the video. Since then we have found out that the ideas of the project could be submitted for PE scholarship.
It has also started being talked about within PE circles and the student has been encouraged to share his ideas and project through a podcast, The video will also be shared this week as well as part of it.

Through this project has also fallen out the Kendall Engraving Supplies Ltd Student Design Award, as the project has been laser cut through our school's equipment, this provides another opportunity to show his learning.

students projects going live

One of the students projects has gone live. The feedback from teachers is impressive. One of the issues that the students are facing is the issues that schools have with their websites. The students used information from educationcounts.govt.nz from the schools directory. They are now having teachers provide feedback that there own school website does not work.

If I put my own schools address in a browser it fails when I am at school. When I am at home it works. That is because schools setup there own DNS settings, normally setting up schoolname.school.nz for their internal domain. This means going to schoolname.school.nz will not work internally in the school, however, when you enter schoolname.school.nz when at home it will find the IP address and access the website.

Another issue that has been brought up is the accuracy of the information, as it was only 104 schools that completed the survey. There are some schools which I think have realised that the information they entered does not put them in a good light and that they want to change the information. Others mention the issues around when the data is collected, what is the longevity of the information.

It was outlined in the survey introduction that this was going to be used to develop a website showing what is going on. Every chase up email included the letter that was sent out that included how the information was going to be used.

I do wonder what the outcome of the next release will be, looking at the feedback that these students are getting.

One of the great things about this project is that it is real data, a real website and that it is available for people to have a look at.

One of the feedback emails,
I have received an email from your student with the link to the finished project. The project is put together well and has validity. Please pass on my congratulations to the students involved as the execution is great.

As a matter of curiosity, I would love to have a summary of how they approached the task and the different obstacles that got in their way.

Awesome work...

*Great to get this feedback, I like the idea of a summary of how they approached the task, guess what, that is their final brief...