April 4 – 8, 2016

Each Friday we post a list of our favorite articles, blog posts, and other resources we’ve run across that relate to Project Based Learning.

Here’s what we liked this week:

Inspiring the Next Generation of Makers
Digital Promise
Karen Cator explains the launch of the Maker Promise, “a campaign to equip more citizens with the tools they need to enable students to design, invent, and make.” Digital Promise created this in response to President Obama’s Nation of Makers campaign and in advance of the 2016 National Week of Making, June 17-23.

Four Teachers, Four Classrooms, One Cross-Curricular STEM Course
Education Week
What a cool idea for a project: students create their own 3D model of an artificial island, after an entry event where they watch a video about the Palm Islands in Dubai. It’s a great example of how to do STEM well – not by merely teaching science and math with occasional connections to engineering, or having a lot of technology in a school, but by combining all four via PBL.

Use Design Thinking to Develop the 7 Mindsets of the Mentally Wealthy
EdTech Researcher/Education Week
Empathy, Creative Confidence, Learn from Failure, Make It, Ambiguity, Optimism, Iterate. Those are the mindsets – which BIE, of course, says can be developed with PBL – that will make students “wealthy” in the future, according to Sabba Quidwai, Director of Innovative Learning at the University of Southern California-Keck School of Medicine.

Project Based Learning Cures Hospital ER Problems – High School Students, PBL, STEM & Literacy
Teachers.net
The story of a project in which seniors at McCutcheon High School, Indiana, created proposals for the redesign of a hospital emergency room, as part of a course in Project Lead the Way’s Biomedical Science sequence. They presented their plan to an audience of very impressed nurses, hospital educators, technicians, and administrators.

Traveling the world, virtually: Project-based learning in elementary school
Learn NC
Fifth-grade teacher Shannon Page explains how she teaches social studies, technology, math, writing, and reading via highly engaging projects where students plan virtual trips to various destinations around the world. Love this quote: “The only reason teachers would not embrace project-based instruction is if they had never seen it in action, if they had never felt the enthusiasm and energy in a classroom full of kids on a mission.”

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