Grade 9: Food or Fuel – Connect Charter School

Grade 9: Food or Fuel

This project is a grade 9 Science Project examining the topic of biofuel development. Students were introduced to the topic through a powerpoint presentation designed to hook the students with some of the controversial facts on the issue.
Students worked through the development of a number of research questions, and then began a collaborative research process using school-hosted blogs.
All of this lead to the creation of a public service announcement (PSA) designed to make an emotional connection to the issue.
You can access all the specific planning details of the project by clicking here.
This is one of the example of work created by the students:

After delivering this project at the end of last school year, the teachers involved worked through our reflective Professional Development framework. The teacher was pleased with the quality of the PSA’s produced and with the buy-in of the students in the issue. A time crunch at the end of the year was a struggle for the project, and this year the teachers are planning on starting the project earlier in order to develop other parts of the project. Also, the teachers felt that while the PSAs were high quality productions, they did not capture all the learning that the students were able to gather. The teachers involved want to develop additional tasks and assessment performances to allow students to demonstrate all the understanding they developed during the research process.

You can listen to the grade 9 teachers analyzing the project below:

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