PBL–California’s Drought

I’m participating in a three-year program about the STEM disciplines and PBL’s (which I wrote about here).  As part of this program I had to write and implement a PBL. I started out working with a partner, and we she wrote a PBL for our grade 8 math curriculum.  Our district decided to pull in an Integrated Math Program (IMP) unit called The a Overland Trail to take the place of most of the last three  modules of our Eureka Math curriculum, and as our her PBL is meant to replace the last module, I didn’t think I would get to it (or it would be overkill). We are also coming very close to testing (actually, it started last week and we test math in next week). Therefore, I decided to write a PBL for grade 7 that would give the students exposure to the remaining concepts we haven’t covered that I know will be covered on the test (well, I’m 99.9% sure they’ll be covered–I’m going from memory here). Since we live in California, I thought the drought provided a perfect context for our PBL.

We are still in the midst of it, and to be honest, some of the activities have taken a lot longer than I planned for (due to the integration of technology, I think.  Note to self: if the activity is tech-heavy, double the time for the lesson since the students are learning to use the tech at the same time they are learning the concept embedded in the activity).

I created a Padlet as our home base of operations.  Students have found this easier to access instead of posting everything in Google Classroom (although I have the URL for the Padlet posted in Google Classroom). Embedded within the main Padlet are student Padlets that contain links for posting assignments or for jump-starting research.

The students found the work on percents much more relevant because there was context in the Reservoir Data Google Sheet. (This is the assignment that took a lot longer than I anticipated. It morphed along the way due to privacy restrictions on the student accounts, so the final set of directions are actually the fourth iteration).

Students collaborating on their Google Sheet.

This student “two-fisted” his reservoir assignment on a day his partner was absent. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he could open two tabs and pull them apart on one computer.

They started the drought research project today. They had an entry event in the beginning that gave some basic information to prompt some noticing and wondering.  The purpose of the research portion is to revisit those “parking lot” questions and give them the opportunity to hopefully answer some of them. Before even making it through my first group of seventh graders I realized I should have broken it down into two parts: research first, presentation second. Because I introduced the whole shooting match at once, the students wanted to skip straight to the creation phase, and they consequently got lost and didn’t quite know how to start.

The third, and last phase (after some instruction on volume and surface area) will be to develop a rain/excess water storage container that can be used by a single household to help mitigate the effects of the drought. The students will go through the design phase first, and then using scale factor, build a scale model of their storage until. (I’ll post pics in an update when we get there).