Project Reflections - All Stars

My students are finishing up an "All stars" project in which they were each assigned six athletes, all playing the same position, to analyze. They had to write equations of lines for each player and use them to infer information about the player and predict how the player would do in the future.

Positives about this project:

• Because I let them help me choose which sports we did, many of them were immediately interested in the project.
• The repetition involved in analyzing six players helped them really master writing an equation of a line when given two points.
• I worked in not only finding x- and y-intercepts (with some nice review of solving equations) but also a review of making predictions using an equation of a line, which was in the last project too. I hope they are starting to see the ways in which an equation can be useful.

Negatives about this project:

• I need to use real information about the players next time. When the students can immediately tell the information is made up, it takes away from their interest (thus negating the first positive). Yes, it would be an investment of time on my part to find the real data. But I think it would pay off in terms of my students' buy-in.
• This is a LONG project. The repetition, while great for skill mastery, takes a lot of time. Even though I remembered not having enough time last year and built in more time this year, I still had to push the deadline back several times in order to keep it reasonable.
  
• Individual work for this project is key. Since I didn't put the kids into groups until most of their work was done, some of them will never make it that far. Normally, they have someone encouraging them, prodding them, to get their work done. Without a group counting on them, some of them don't have the self-motivation to get the work done.