Focus Projects

Concept  The concept of a focus project is that real projects in what students like to call the real world are rarely done by a single individual.  Nor are they generally completed in a week or a month or even a semester.  Truly significant work is often the work of a lifetime, taking input from many people and moving by fits and starts.  The concept of a focus project is to provide such real world projects in a context that allows students to work on them and cumulatively achieve significant results as a community of scholars.  CLICK HERE FOR A PRESENTATION

VISION Focus projects are guided by a vision.  Examples of long range projects guided by such visions abound in the history of science and technology.  An example is Dynabook which was conceived by Alan Kay in the late 1960's and has been a force guiding many aspects of the development of personal computers, first at Xerox's PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and later at Apple and Palm.  It is a Vision still not fully realized, but retrospectively one can see how significant the Dynabook vision concept has been.

Some Other Examples Other examples that come to mind include Eric Drexler's Nanotechnology, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and particularly dear to my heart are Gerald O'Neill's Space Colonies.  It is not difficult to multiply examples.  

So What Does This Have To Do With Anything? Well, the basic idea is to create Vision Statements which become drivers for Focus Projects.  The students would brainstorm the structure of the project, driving down to individually doable stepping stones that would be achievable in a manageable time frame, like months or semesters.  The students, working as individuals or in small teams, would work on some aspect of the projects.  The ARCHIVES of the Focus Projects would retain the work the students did on each stepping stone and the student's contribution would be preserved, not only in the archives, but in the History and Display of the Focus Project.  Each Focus Project would have its own Web Page for example.  The Display would be a physical wall-mounted display that would show the stepping stone projects and progress towards achieving the vision.  Each student's contribution would be recorded and their work products made available to support the next stepping stones.

Examples Focus Projects:

Image Analysis of the Shroud of Turin
JIAB or GIAB (C.S. Jack Lewis or G. Gilbert K. Chesterton)
                                In A Box ~ translation of writings into a
                                                      model of the ideas
Winning the ACM Programming Contest
Classroom of the Future