Thursday, October 24, 2013

Consumption Project

https://plus.google.com/photos/104665354261133320564/albums/5854582620766544849?authkey=CI39pPz3lf6FzwE
Project Outline

As I look back at this project there are some things I liked about and some things that need overhauling.

Liked:
-students engaged in quality research and fact finding to determine the rate at which a resource was consumed by a certain population at a certain point in time
-students were thinking critically about his to represent their model so as to bring the Math to life by picking a quantity that would be significant (for a certain population at a certain time)
-the project points to the global theme of sustainability
-models were engaging
-choice of topics, methods of modelling increased engagement

Bigger and better next time:
-sustainability is such a deep and far reaching theme, I want to make sure to do it justice in a project like this. I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, but for starters I'd either look at sustainable practices with respect to either the food industry or energy sector (rather then leaving the option open)
-again, to better serve the sustainability theme I want to make sure this project culminates in a real, applicable, significant prouduct. This could, perhaps, be something like a marketing project and pitch to a local restaurant. It would be really cool to get a sense of what a restaurant needs and how we can help th market themselves, or to help raise awareness of sustainable food choices 
-I could see using a question like "How do our consumption habits impact others?", or perhaps even making this more specific like "How does Canadian consumption of coffee effect Ethiopia?", but I'm not sure how the socials ties would be made, and that relationship may likely dictate the scope of the question and inquiry.
-as with other projects with a physical product, I've seen that getting into researching, drafting, and revising a model design early really pays off in the end. Along these same lines a goal I've been thinking of lately is to really improve the quality if sketches. I want to see students think through and prepare well for their sketches so they can approximate their product as well as possible. I wonder if a strategy here would be to have students actually prototype a scale sketch or model before constructing their final product.


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