From iMATHination to the Classroom -
When Sara Hughes from Curie High School attended the 2011 iMATHination Conference, she came away with an idea for a school project after attending Ethno-Math/Science and Passionate Research, a workshop about making science personal and relevant.  Teachers learned how to tie cultural background to a lesson, for example, tracing a “meal footprint“ by determining the amount of land required to prepare a particular dish.

Ms. Hughes decided she could use this approach in her chemistry classes and developed a Research Scrapbook project for second semester.  Students were told to choose an item in their house and travel backwards through that item’s life, documenting each stage of its development from where it showed up in a store all the way back to how it had been formed in the earth.  Their choices were interesting, a stuffed monkey, dog tag, Snicker’s bar, promise ring, chocolate bee, florescent light bulb, and Play Station 3 were among the students’ choices.  “The projects that ended up the most successful were the ones where the object was special or important to the student,” said Ms. Hughes.

The project was also an opportunity for students to learn self-discipline and independent study.  Each student was expected to create their own timeline for completing the project.  They had to determine how they could manage this project along with their regular class work and assignments from their other classes.  Ms. Hughes was available for consultation during the project. 

One of the students, Ingrid, did her project on the dog tag her 6 month Chihuahua, named Slinky wears.  She said she did the research, hand wrote her initial draft, put it into a Power Point, and then added pictures.  In the process of doing the research, she was amazed to find all of the different processes it goes through to become the end object. “Even though it looks like a small thing, a lot of work goes into the making of it,” Ingrid said.

For the most part, Ms. Hughes was satisfied with the results, but says that if she were to do this assignment again, she would give more guidance to the students on explaining processes.