Banal projects

December 7, 2023 Terry Freedman

History class. Photo by Terry Freedman

Boring projects are the worst kind of thing to give students. My way of thinking is simple: if you can’t think of anything exciting, get them to come up with something themselves.

I was thinking of this because I came across an article I wrote back in 2007, commenting on a report by Ofsted into ICT:

Citizenship In the schools in which citizenship was well taught, a core programme was evident. In addition, teachers in related subject areas had considered the implications of citizenship for their curricula. This was particularly evident in a sharper focus on relevant and topical issues and in subject content that drew from or augmented learning in citizenship. For example, information and communication technology was sometimes combined successfully with citizenship education, enabling pupils to have direct contact with communities very different from their own. In one example, a city technology college was developing an e-citizenship course in which pupils linked with a South African township. They designed and used a website promoting pupils’ voices and online feedback, met a member of parliament and were involved in the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign. Key messages • Again, ICT or educational technology can provide the glue that binds different subjects together. • What I particularly like about the example given in the second paragraph is that the activity was “real”. Too often, ICT teachers instruct their pupils to pretend that are setting up a website for a fictitious video rental store, or something equally banal (not to say pointless).

Terry Freedman, Practical ICT Special Edition 01

That collaboration sounds like it could be really interesting. Another example that comes to mind was a project the older ICT and computing students had undertaken in a secondary school in Italy. The local park had become inhabited by winos and drug dealers, so most people avoided it like the plague. The students did research, and put together a proposal for how the park could be rescued. That would have been impressive enough, but they went further. They arranged to present their findings and proposals to the local councillors — and their ideas were adopted.

Obviously, the whole project was much wider than digital skills, but that’s the case in real life too.

Subscribers to my free newsletter Digital Education have access to the original periodical from which the above extract was taken.

If you really cannot come up with any ideas for interesting projects, enjoy exploring these websites for ideas for projects for Computing. Not all of them are relevant, but you and your students will, I think, benefit from looking at and discussing them.

Half-bakery

Makezine

Technology Instructables

One last thing. If you fancy a bit of a change from education technology etc then you might like to explore my other newsletter, Eclecticism. There I cover literature, write book reviews, and explore other uses of artificial intelligence.