It's the Beginning of the End. . .

I have been thinking (or worrying!) about my capstone project for over a year now -- ever since I started grad school -- and I am now so excited to report that I have a group and an awesome project to be a part of! Dr. Zheng has brought in a client, the Museum of Natural History, with some instructional design needs, and I am going to be part of a group working on one of those projects!

The project is going to be a web page, geared towards upper elementary school students, that teaches the process of classification. It is to be similar to a project that a group did last year for the museum about observation. I know the people from that group because I took the summer classes a year early, and I have enjoyed following their progress on the site, so I am familiar with the scope of this project. I am also excited to be working on a project that will be meaningful to students, and that will hopefully be used! My husband is a fourth grade teacher, so I look forward to working on materials that could benefit his class, and I also anticipate that I could use his expertise to give some feedback as well. And finally, although the subject I generally teach is math, science is a close relation. This project is one that I can really put myself into.

We met with our contacts at the museum, Madlyn Runburg and Heather Paulsen, about two weeks ago, to interview them and get further details about what they would like us to do. I'll write about that in the next entry. But for now . . . I can honestly say that I'm really excited about this project! I hope it turns out as great as it sounds!