Honestly, it took me a good minute to think of an experience to encode. Even though I had chosen my experience before I read through the detailed birthday party event, I did end up using a lot of the research found in the example. I imagine that one the students see the Detailed Protocol, many will choose the same type of experience so they can finish the project quickly without much research. My plan is to show the students the Diagram Workspace for the birthday party to give them an idea of the “flow” on the first day. Then I’ll pull up an empty Detailed Protocol and we’ll fill out one of the conditions as a class discussion to give students the idea of the scope of the research they should be doing.
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I also thought of that too. But I also mentioned that if any of them used the birthday party, they would not get credit for the assignment. Just as a blanket understanding. I also have had them form groups of 4 people called Performance Task Groups that they present to, bounce ideas off of and generally be there as a help if I am not there. They also present to them instead of taking a day or two for class presentations and then they grade each other through the rubric form. This one may be a little bit more difficult to accomplish that because of all the items needed, but we will see what happens. Something for discussion for sure at our CSP meetup.
@susan.james I also am apprehensive about giving students too many exemplars out of fear or “stealing” their ideas. That being said, when I have done this activity with students, they did not struggle with picking a different topic. I emphasized it should be something THEY care about or like - I have had students do things around basketball, or ballet, my favorite was one student who did it on a “Target Run” (here in Minneapolis, we LOVE our Target!).
I would say one thing some students struggled with was picking a diverse set of ways to encode something as well as the reasoning behind it. For example, I had a few students who said “ASCII” for absolutely everything - I was looking for more diversity. Other students just said it would take 10 characters to encode a name with no real reasoning behind it. I think next year I might consider asking students to peer review one anothers’s work or make a requirement around justification or number of different methods used to encode the experience.
How did this section end up going with your execution plan? I liked your idea to form groups that were able to bounce ideas off each other and then present to each other rather than taking up class time to have everyone present individually. When I have larger class sizes, I can imagine that would be helpful.
The groups did well and their response to them was positive. They all felt they learned a lot from each other in a group setting like that. I am with you though about using examples like that. They did not use the birthday party example, but they did use like you said a lot of ASCII and not as much data. Next year I think I will change this lesson up for sure.