An Introduction to Project Work for High Schoolers
December 31st is, of course, my absolute favorite day of the year.
And I like January 1st, and all the following days of the New Year’s holidays, but there’s only one favorite.
On normal days, things don’t always go as planned. To be honest, they rarely go as they’re supposed to at all.
But not December 31st!
You don’t have to go to school that day, the tutors are quietly sleeping in their palaces, and there isn’t even that much homework assigned for January.
Usually, by three in the afternoon, I’m completely free from schoolwork and can finally start getting ready to relax.
First things first, of course, I open my laptop and, in it, the special gaming version of the Opera browser. My laptop is crammed to the gills with all sorts of stuff, but I could find the red icon of the once-a-year-launched gaming browser with my eyes closed—there it is, in the top right corner!
Then—how could I not!—I place two or three cups of coffee with milk next to me (one spoonful of sugar in each), get comfortable at my desk, put on my headphones, and immerse myself in a Game for about five hours.
To be honest, I don’t get to play like this every year, but I still try not to fall too far behind and keep up with the new releases. This year I discovered Minecraft—seriously, it’s not a game, it’s a masterpiece!
Around eight in the evening, I get up, run to the shower, give my family their presents, and schedule my messengers and email to send congratulations to everyone who deserves them. And then, finally, it arrives—the main course!
At 9:00 PM, I crash into bed and sleep soundly for two days, until the evening of January 2nd, and if I’m lucky, until the evening of the 3rd, making up for, at least in a small way, the hundreds of hours of lost sleep I’ve accumulated over the year.
That was exactly the plan this year…
But on the morning of January 2nd, I was woken up by my dad, who wished me a Happy New Year and said just one word: PROJECTS!
So, Projects.
Every high school student in Russia now has to do projects. An individual one—or two—and a group one.
If you read the websites of various pedagogical associations, you can understand the following about Projects (what follows is unrestrained officialese):
1. An academic project is an independently developed and created product (material or intellectual), from idea to implementation, that possesses novelty and is completed under the supervision and consultation of a teacher. By completing a project, you can demonstrate the knowledge and skills you have acquired in technology classes and other subjects.
2. The final project provides an opportunity to realize your potential and learn something new, to take a step forward in your development.
3. For a student, a project is an opportunity for the maximum disclosure of their creative potential. It is an activity that allows them to express themselves individually or in a group, to test their strengths, apply their knowledge, be useful, and publicly display the result they have achieved. It is an activity aimed at solving an interesting problem formulated by the students themselves. The result of this activity—the discovered solution to the problem—is practical and significant for the discoverers themselves.
4. One of the features of projects can be considered the presence of socially significant results. The results of projects can be of at least two types:
Product-based — the creation of some material or non-material products, such as: acquiring new knowledge that the student has summarized in a visual form; creating an art object, a work of art, equipment, an invention, a technology.
5. Educational — these are the already mentioned soft skills and hard skills, the development of values formed during the work on the project.
For high schoolers, projects offer an opportunity to delve deeper into a chosen field and create their own product. In doing so, students need to interact with the outside world: secure funding, organize a school-wide event, present the project results at a conference. Project-based activity teaches kids to work with problems—even large problems must be solved sequentially and effectively.
It’s clear that all of this is just theory.
The creators of all these programs finished school in the 2000s at best, and more likely in the 1990s. They obviously didn’t have any Projects, and their knowledge of them is purely theoretical.
What happens in reality?
Well, scientists believe it’s like this:
The author believes that the practice existing in mass schooling is inadequate for the task that the project method is aimed at solving—the development of students’ thinking. The project work accepted in school practice is replaced by writing essays «on a topic,» i.e., pseudo-project work.
I completely agree with this article; those are my words exactly.
In my daily life, as I wrote in the article about Hashnode, I don’t even have time to eat. I get up for school at 6:00 AM, get home around 6-7 PM, do homework until midnight, and then grab a few hours of sleep.
The officials at the Russian Ministry of Education, understanding the daily routine of a normal high school student, have allocated 1 hour per week for project work (so as not to overload the high schooler—such touching concern).
Picture 1. A screenshot from a typical Russian electronic school diary. It displays the official time allocated for the Individual Project.
The fields show Classes per week: 1 and Total classes: 36 hours, confirming the author’s point about the limited official time budgeted for this major assignment.
There are 35 or 37 school weeks in a year, but projects, contrary to the schedule, don’t start from the first week. Is it possible to do a normal project in (a hypothetical) 36 hours?
Picture 2. The detailed weekly schedule for the «Individual Project,» totaling 36 hours. It illustrates the 1 hour per week allocation.
Crucially, it shows 0 hours are scheduled during official school holidays, including the Winter break.
This highlights the central irony of the article: while the official plan provides no time, students are forced to use their «free» holiday time to do the actual work.
Well, of course, absolutely not.
By my estimates, to do a more or less decent job, you need about a hundred hours. And if you plan to take your project beyond your school, not just to tick a box or get a passing grade, but to try to become a prize-winner or winner of some Project Competition or another Olympiad—you need 200 hours, no less.
And the officials, understanding all this, wrote into the programs that the high school student must find time for the project during their extracurricular hours.
Clear. Cool. Wise.
But where are you supposed to find this time?!
To tell the younger students and everyone reading this article a little about what I consider to be high-quality projects, I’ll provide a few titles of such works.
These are projects by winners of various Olympiads and Competitions:
1. Synthesis and Properties of Modified Amino-Formaldehyde Polymers (more here, p.189)
2. Synthesis of Substituted Pyrrolidones and Isoindolines Based on the Interaction of Donor-Acceptor Cyclopropanes with Anilines/Benzylamines (here)
And finally, my personal favorite:
3. Reconstruction of a Person’s Appearance from Skeletal Remains at Home (from here)
4. Production of a Mutant NFL Protein with a Single Amino Acid Substitution A149V, Found in Patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (from here)
Honestly, I’m green with envy for the kids who study in such cool schools. My school made the list of the top 70 schools in Moscow last year—but there’s no biology lab on my floor, or even in my building. I don’t have access to patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, and unfortunately, I have nowhere to get human skeletal remains to drag home for reconstructing the appearance of the deceased.
And I suspect my family wouldn’t be too thrilled about it either.
After looking at these works, my dad said that even in university, he rarely saw coursework of this level, and even final theses often didn’t measure up to the aforementioned works by high schoolers.
Of course, Dad said (he’s a skeptic), there are some doubts about whether the kids wrote these papers themselves, or if their parents or freelance Project writers were working on them (around the clock) for a hefty price…
But if the kids wrote them themselves—they should, of course, be admitted without any entrance exams to the best Ivy League universities (in the USA), or to Bologna (the oldest on the planet) University, or maybe even to Moscow State University!
So, during my rightful New Year’s sleeping-in holidays, I am forced to sit online, searching for information for my THREE projects, studying it, mixing sources, proposing and refuting hypotheses, writing text, and designing presentations (I hate presentations, by the way!).
In effect, I need to study a COMPLETELY new topic for me and write a 50-page paper on it, or better yet, a hundred.
It seems like this is something students do in Russian universities. Only they are given four years for it, and some get six. And they have no other task.
But high school students are given half a year at best, and writing the Project doesn’t grant them exemption from homework.
This, if you think about it, is an amazing paradox—it seems most university students aren’t studying but are just goofing off. And if you were to make university education as intensive as it is in the upper grades of modern Moscow schools, you could squeeze a 4-year bachelor’s degree into a third of the time, at least!
But I digress.
I’ll leave this sound idea for the officials at the Ministry of Education to ponder and will briefly tell you about my Projects.