Project Ideation Activity

In this activity, you will brainstorm possible projects that your students could complete.

Background: Project Meaning

When you consider a project, what makes it meaningful? What makes it worthwhile for you and your students? What leads you to choose one project over another? Take a moment to think it through.

Considerations

For Hyland's high school internship, we spend a lot of time thinking about good project ideas. Here are some potential metrics by which we measure the suitability of a project:

• Fun: will the idea of this project spark joy in your students? is it something on which they will want to work?
• Value: will the end-product be useful to you? will it actually help you, or your students, or someone else?
• Feasibility: can this project be completed by your students? how much learning overhead will be required?
• Scope: how much time will it take for you to complete this project? do you have enough time? do your students have enough time?
• Stakes: how important is this project? will a stakeholder feel let down if the project is not completed within the timeframe?

The Definition of Success

For our internships, we generally focus on Product Quality, Student Experience, and Student Growth. After a project cycle has been completed, we may use these measures to attempt to define our success:

• The final product was functional
• The final product showed the best possible work of the students
• The project had an impact beyond the team
• The stakeholders were happy
• The students worked well together
• The students learned new things
• The students improved their coding skills
• The students were exposed to new ideas
• The students had fun
• The students felt inspired
• The students met their own individual goals

Considering these potential metrics can be helpful when deciding which type of project to do. If you want to maximize student experience, you may choose a more fun and low-stakes project, whereas if you want to maximize product quality, you may choose a more feasible and valuable project. If you are ONLY concerned with student growth, you may not need to worry about scope, and can push students to work on something that may never be complete. Our team usually leans toward student experience, because we really want to inspire our students and enrich their lives. We are less concerned with amazing final products or incredible student skill-building, but a lot of that comes down to the projects themselves.

Exercise: Project Ideas

With all of this in mind, try to think of as many possible project ideas as you can! Blue sky, no bad ideas. Write them down on paper or in a document. These could be:

• Products that would help you in your day-to-day life
• Products that would help your work
• Products that would help a non-profit organization of some kind
• Products that are purely just for fun
• Products that could be valuable from a business perspective

Ranking the Projects

Once you have written down as many project ideas as you can, it's time to rank them! Give each project a score in these categories:

• Fun (1: no fun, 5: super fun)
• Value (1: useless, 5: would use all the time)
• Feasibility (1: super simple/easy, 5: extremely complex/difficult)
• Scope (1: doable with very little time, 5: would take a very long time)
• Stakes (1: does not really matter to anyone, 5: matters a lot to someone)

You can weigh each category based on whatever you think makes the most sense. You can also add your own categories, or remove any of these categories, or come up with an entirely different system to rank your projects! The purpose of this exercise is to provide some way by which to compare different project ideas, and explain what has worked for the small team at Hyland.