Year-Long IPC Project

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In the summer of this year, I approached @whowe67 about turning the traditional IPC curriculum into an all STEM project based learning class. The other thing I wanted was to put the 'integrated' back into IPC. In past years, we have taught one semester of chemistry and then one semester of physics.  She was interested in both ideas and we got together before school started to hash out a way to combine chemistry and physics into one class.

To this day, I wish I had been recording our conversation so I could describe the steps that lead us down the path to stranding my students on an uninhibited island for a whole year.

I don't remember how we got there – who said what that triggered the whole burst of creative energy. What I do know is that we wanted to start with something fairly concrete rather then some of the more abstract concepts in the TEKS. At one point, we discussed the water table and how parts of it always cause problems on tests. Our idea then was to look at solution chemistry, perhaps as an investigation in the water-strapped West.

Whatever energy was in the air that day inspired both of us. Soon we were batting ideas back and forth so quickly that we could barely write them down fast enough.

We decided to strand the students on an island ten years into the future. We created a scenario where a tsunami hit their cruise ship, wrecking it on the island. We considered the reasons why they were there, the topography of the island, the latitude and longitude where the island was located, and what materials they could salvage from the ship.

Once we had our scenario, we starting fitting each and every TEK for the IPC course into our narrative. We rearranged the units several times and used energy as the thematic concept that would unite the whole year unit into a continuous, on-going story.  By next May, the students would have a portfolio of information covering the entire year that wouldn't include science only, but would touch on math, English, and ultimately social studies.  Their final task would be to create a system of government that would administer the colony.

What we hoped for was that a project covering the entire year would unite the disparate parts of the IPC TEKS into an integrated whole instead of being taught one disconnected piece at a time.   We hoped that the students would be able to see the common themes and concepts that run through all science disciplines.

We anticipated that one of the problems with a year-long project would be grouping. With each group potentially taking different paths through the year, then switching groups midway through wouldn't be a viable option.  That meant that the students might be uncomfortably stuck with each other.

One thing that we didn't anticipate was the difficulty of having many different groups working on different things when the class size is very big. My largest class is a lot of chaos. The other issue is the squabbling that goes on with certain personality conflicts. My school Learning Liaison is working on helping with that one.

My plan is to report on this complex project over the course of the year.