Curiosity Projects - A fantastic way for students to learn about something new

This semester, I am using again a curiosity-project activity in my Life of Mammals course. If you have never used a curiosity project activity in your courses, I suggest you read my previous post. The main idea behind curiosity projects is that when we are curious about something, we want to explore and learn about it. 

Curiosity is at the very heart of learning and it is what drives or guides people to want to learn more about something. 

Once that initial spark of curiosity happens, the next step is to investigate the topic, event or thing more thoroughly. That investigation then leads to wanting to wholly understand it or to unravel its mystery. And of course, that's where learning comes into action.

Curiosity projects are a fantastic way for students to learn about something new; something exciting or interesting selected by each one of them. Students are free to learn or be curious about anything that attracts their attention as long as it is related to the main subject of the course. 

To help students select a topic, idea or question and to maintain motivation and interest, I organize 3-4 brainstorm sessions during the semester. Each session has a different purpose/goal and is meant to provide students with a working plan to conduct successfully their curiosity project.

In this post, I provide some information about what I am planning to do for the Brainstorm Session 1. I will provide information about the other brainstorm sessions in other posts.

BRAINSTORM SESSION 1

In conjunction with a short pre-class questionnaire, students will use the steps listed below to identify 2-4 ideas or topics that they may be interested in exploring. 

I will be using Google Docs to create the pre-brainstorm questionnaire.  The goal of the questionnaire is to encourage students to start thinking about topics, issues or questions that they would like to explore. Students would have the chance to use their answers during the brainstorm session.

Brainstorm Session 1 will need about 1 and 1/2 hours. At the end of the activity, I expect that each student will have 2-4 ideas to work on. Students will be able to start gathering information, explore their topics/ideas and generate questions. 

Do you use Curiosity Projects in your courses?

 If you do, I would be interested to know about the ways/activities that you conduct to help students.