With the calendar ready to flip to June many students are completing their end of the year projects in their respective classes. Many students have had to do multiple projects for their different classes. Due to the fact that each project has its own unique aspect this had led to many students weighing the pros and cons of each project.
In Mr. Shahin’s AP World History class students were given an end of the year research project. The only guideline of the project was to research something that you were interested in. It could literally be anything such as the origins of gelato, why conference realignment is happening in the National Colleague Athletic Association, the different conspiracies of the John F. Kennedy assassination, and different Indian holidays. Once students thoroughly researched their topic they were asked to present their findings to the class in some way. Some students elected to use the traditional PowerPoint and lecture method others choose to do physical demonstrations of their projects. Letting students choose their own topic has led to many students enjoying the end of the year project.
“It’s one of the only projects where you can pick a topic that actually interests you,” senior Mark Debney said. “I think it makes it way easier to do because you actually take an interest in what you are researching.”
Students in Mr. Murray’s Probability and Statistics class also had to do an end of the year project more commonly known as the “stats project”. The stats project consisted of students having to select a topic that interests them such as social media or working out and makes different claims about the topic (i.e. I think that 70% of the students at DHS use a twitter). In order to either support or reject their claims students had to make their own surveys and hand them out to roughly 250 students. They then had to tally the data, organize them into different graphs, and then run different statistics tests on them so they could either support or reject their claims. The students had to present their findings in the form of a paper and a five minute presentation to the rest of the class about their project.
“I liked the stats project because you could do it on something you found interesting,” senior Mason White said. “The only part I didn’t like was tallying the data because that took a lot of time and you can’t screw up the tallying because it can mess up the whole project.”
The end of the year projects have also extended beyond the core subjects and into the Career and Technical Educations classes such as Merchandising Operations. Merchandising Operations teacher Melissa Deboer gave her students the project of putting together a business plan for their mock businesses. Starting in mid-May, Deboer put assigned her students into different groups of three or four students. She then told them that they were to put together a business plan for a “Pooper Scooper” company. The business plan consisted of ensuring a positive image for the company, choosing a primary and secondary target market, creating a promotional campaign timeline, and an advertising campaign. After students created their business plans they then had to present their plan to the rest of the class in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
“For the most part I liked the end of the year project,” junior Audrey Moolenar said. “I like how we didn’t learn the information just reading the book and taking notes but instead we got to do a hands on project and I think we it has helped us learn the information better”.
