Tuesday 20 June 2017

How Stuff Works And Our First IP



For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on our first personal interest projects (IPs) for the year. This round of IPs have a 'How Stuff Works' theme, requiring us to identify something that interests us that we would like to explain, ideally with a science focus. After we each thought of an initial idea, we then needed to think of some driving questions that would help us answer the bigger question - "How or why (something) works".

For those unfamiliar with IPs, we always have 3 aspects that we must cover or do, including...
1. Creating a plan.
2. Documenting progress (usually in the form of a series of blog posts).
3. Sharing our learning with others.



Just some of our big questions in Koru 1 include:
How do headphones work? (Oliana)
How do car engines work? (Caleb)
How do tornadoes work? (Mikayla)
How do our eyes work? (Helena)
How does the rain cycle work? (Daniel)
How does a chemical reaction happen? (Bradley)
Why do we have seasons? (Jade)
Why do we have timezones? (Alecia)

An 'IP Workshop' is the name given to each session devoted to these projects during class time. We have agreed on rules around what should be happening during each IP Workshop, especially in regards to our learning environment.




While researching our topic areas, we have also been learning all about key words in research, skim reading for information, how to take notes, and the importance of keeping track of the sources of information we have been using.



Keep an eye on Twitter and our personal blogs for more information and updates!

2 comments:

  1. At t he moment I am drafting in google docs. I love I.ps because they are fun plus we get to chose wha we research about and most schools the teacher will chose for them. but there is 3 rules 1 we have to shere with our class mates 2 we have to keep us update 3 I think is manage your self.

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  2. Yes Bradley, they are quite awesome aren't they! Cant wait to see what topics everyone did.
    Reuben
    (Past Bromley student)

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