Grade 8 Final Project

The future is waiting!!! At TCS teachers strive to prepare our students for the future. How do we prepare students to be innovative, critical thinkers, collaborators and demonstrate capacities that make them employable in a world that is constantly changing.

For this, we need problem solvers!

As their final assessment, we challenged our grade 8s to find authentic ways to demonstrate their learning from this year in their four core subjects while exemplifying the 8 Alberta Learning Core Competencies.

The students built a Rube Goldberg Machine that had many stages. Each stage required a clue to progress to the next stage, similar to a locked room.

The groups used their knowledge from Math, Science and Social to create each clue for their peers to progress through their simple machine.
The goal is that their clues require and should demonstrate their knowledge from this year (i.e pythagorean theorem, Aztecs, cells and organisms) and their peer’s knowledge as they solve each clue.

We are looking for their ability to incorporate as much content as possible, create a unique machine and work together as a team to build, innovate and then ultimately articulately and fluently communicate their knowledge and critical thinking in a final oral presentation.

The final presentation was to create an infomercial that each group member participated in to sell us their machine on why it is unique, innovative and purposeful. Watch the video below to see an example of one of the commercials.