Last year St Luke’s Catholic College designated Wednesday afternoons to “Adventure Learning.” Teachers designed courses based on students’ interests and after an exciting showcase of courses students chose their top 5 activities and were placed in a course. students were working with peers from other stages and teachers they hadn’t worked with before. It was a great success. Here is a link to my blog about my experience with my Radio Course.

This year, being the beginning of the school year and still getting to know our students, it was decided that Wednesday afternoons would be dedicated to “passion projects” within each stage. Stage 1 students brainstormed ideas about things they would like to learn about and teachers designed courses around the most popular responses. Ss Then chose which course they would like to be a part of.

The courses this term are:

• Animals and Reptiles
• Dinosaurs
• Games
• Inventions
• Music and Dance
• Space
• Robots and Coding

My course is robots and coding. When I first saw the I had coding I was excited and immediately had thoughts and plans about different coding games and projects that we could do. As part of my first lesson I asked Ss to write/draw what they wanted to do during their passion project time. I had anticipated certain answers prior to this discussion but the students came up with all sorts of interesting ideas that I hadn’t even thought of. For example: The first activity that I had planned was a challenge task to create an ozobot maze. I made a presentation with videos and made what I thought was a very exciting selling pitch for this task. Some students loved the idea but all that some students wanted to do was design and make their own robot. My first instinct was to say no and ask them to do the task I had designed, after all I had spent a lot of time planning and organising this lesson! However, I stopped myself and thought about the point of the passion project. These students have an interest in robots and want to use their time designing and making a replica robot. So why can’t they? They would still be problem solving, thinking creatively and most importantly doing something they are passionate about. So I said yes.

This week an outsider walking in to the space may have seen chaos. What I saw was students thoroughly engaged in their project. Making, reflecting, re-designing and problem solving to perfect their design. I heard things like “That didn’t work, time for plan b”  and “what if we tried this…”

   

 

I have been pleasantly surprised at how creative the students in my group have been and look forward to continuing the journey of robots and coding for passion projects this term!

Follow me on Twitter (@Miss_Hoban16 ) to see more photos and videos of our passion projects.