3.3.1 Project initiation
Last updated
Last updated
The aim of project initiation is to establish the project's basic framework. Depending on your school's context, project initiation can be led by the student, the teacher, or both, and it can even involve input from the community. The crucial point is to form a clear project idea that encourages students to define their goals and tasks.
In traditional schools, you can take a cue from eduScrum. You can examine the course goals and educational objectives for the quarter and suggest some project ideas that align with the curriculum and the teacher's guidance. You convert your curriculum and educational goals into potential project ideas. You then let students pick the project idea that excites them the most and trust them to complete the work.
Alternatively, you can draw inspiration from Agora. Transform educational objectives into Challenges, which are expressed as design questions. You can also allow students to propose their own Challenges and guide them in turning these into design questions.
If you're inspired by Agile Learning Centers (ALCs), you can utilize the offerings/requests board along with the gameshifting board. This helps you plan a brainstorming session to collect ideas for activities, projects, or challenges that interest students. You'll need to facilitate this brainstorming session, use Scrum techniques to organize and clarify the ideas, and determine which project ideas students will work on.
The most basic gameshifting board has a column for setting intentions. It also covers the way discussions are conducted, the physical arrangement, the roles people play, and the duration of the meeting. The person organizing the meeting, often called the game architect, outlines the meeting's rules and selects the types of interactions and the overall atmosphere or energy for the meeting.
As game architect, you can feel free to adapt the board to your needs, see below some handwritten examples:
To illustrate this process, let's consider starting the meeting promptly at 9 am and concluding it punctually at 10 am. Our collective objective here is to facilitate a brainstorming session where we freely exchange and share ideas, especially those related to projects and activities.
In terms of maintaining our energy levels and creating a relaxed atmosphere, we propose adopting a standing meeting format.
As for interaction and communication dynamics, we encourage a "jump-in" approach. This means participants can contribute their ideas at any point when they feel inspired, whether they are students or teachers.
In defining roles within the meeting, we recommend designating a facilitator to guide the proceedings and ensure a smooth flow of discussion. Additionally, it's crucial to have someone responsible for reminding participants to record their ideas. To adhere to the 60-minute time frame, having a dedicated timekeeper is essential. If necessary, it can also be beneficial to assign someone to take notes during the meeting.
The Gameshifting board serves as a tool to make the implicit social rules of the meeting explicit from the beginning and throughout the meeting. It's versatile and helpful in various settings. These boards clarify expectations and the structure of meetings.
For this project initiation phase, we suggest breaking the meeting into three parts, changing the structure of the meeting by explicitly using the gameshifting board. Start with a Brainstorming intention and gather ideas for 15 minutes, then move to Reflect for 30 minutes, and close by Prioritizing/Deciding in the last 15 minutes. Use the gameshifting board to adjust the intention and structure of each meeting phase.
You can read more about the gameshifting board in the following sources:
Handbook of the project result 1 for the Erasmus+ project Agile4Collaboration
Videos of the project result 1 for the Erasmus+ project AgileXR:
Make and place the offerings/requests board. Adapt it to your needs if needed. Use it in the first 15 minutes to collect ideas from the group.
Create a board with two columns: "offerings" and "requests." You can place this board on the wall or use an online platform like Mural, Trello, or any other web tool designed for boards. When using a physical board on the wall, invite students and teachers to jot down their ideas on sticky notes and stick them on the board.
This board serves as a way to collect ideas from the brainstorming session, gather topics or activities that students and teachers are interested in working on, and accumulate the offerings that individuals can contribute to the group.
In the "offerings" column, participants place sticky notes containing ideas for what they can offer to the group. This could be their expertise, activities they can host, something they can teach, or anything they're willing to share with others. People share their skills, knowledge, and interests with the group. This group activity can also be paired with an individual activity to connect with the students. For instance, you can pose questions to the group based on the Covideos Ikigai canvas to guide the brainstorming session.
In the "requests" column, participants use sticky notes to list topics they want to learn about. They may need help from someone within the group or an external expert. For example, a student might want to learn about climate issues, and someone else in the group may share this interest but lacks expertise. They request assistance, support, lessons, or expertise.
The requests can also be framed as "How Might We" questions.
Both columns, "offerings" and "requests," can be inspired by the Agora approach and include 'Challenges.' Students and teachers write their ideas on sticky notes and place them on the board.
It's essential to remember that everyone has something to offer and something to request, creating a dynamic and collaborative environment for learning and growth.
Adjust the gameshifting board for a Reflect session according to your specific requirements.
Instead of standing and aiming for a relaxed atmosphere, it may be more appropriate to have everyone sit down and focus. In this setting, participants can raise their hand when they have an opinion.
During this Reflect session, use Scrum techniques to organize the offerings and requests. Take the time to structure and cluster the ideas. Engage in a discussion with the students, considering the pros and cons of the various ideas. Group together ideas that are similar or related, creating clusters of related sticky notes. Assign a label to each group to clearly categorize and identify the clusters. This process helps streamline and make sense of the collected ideas. The Reflect session should last approximately 30 minutes and is a valuable step in refining and prioritizing the ideas generated.
Use affinity mapping techniques to do this, get inspired by reading more about brainstorm techniques:
Set the gameshifting board to hold a Decide session. Adapt it to your needs. A suggestion is to do this part of the session by standing up and being focused. Silent and jump-in to place the voting dots.
After clustering the requests and offerings, you'll have a board with cards that need to be prioritized. To conclude the brainstorming session and decide which ideas will progress to the creation phase, you can employ various prioritization methods, and one of them is called Dotmocracy or Dot voting.
Here's how it works: Each student is given a set of colored dots to vote with. The number of dots should be roughly around 25% of the total available options to vote on. Students use these dots to indicate which ideas or cards they consider the most important or valuable.
This method allows for a democratic and visual way to determine the ideas that have the most support and should be given priority for further development. It helps ensure that the collective preferences and interests of the group are considered when selecting ideas to move forward with.
Taking inspiration from the MoSCoW prioritization method often used in software development, you can instruct your students to initially place their dots on the cards that fall under the "Must" category. This indicates that these are the ideas they consider of utmost importance and have the highest priority for inclusion in the Creation phase.
By following this approach, you can ensure that the ideas that are most critical and vital to the group's goals are given the highest priority and are more likely to be pursued in the next phase of the project.
To conclude the Decide session, reorganize the sticky notes if possible, making it clear which ideas have received the most votes.
The choice of whether to work individually or in groups and how to organize the project-based work is entirely up to you and how you want to design your project. At the end of this session, you should have a clearly defined topic or topics and the individuals or groups responsible for working on those topics.
If you'd rather not collaborate with your students to co-create the project idea, you also have the option to collaborate with your fellow teachers. Together, you can develop the project concept and create a multidisciplinary project. This approach is a viable alternative.
Collaborating with other teachers allows for a diverse range of expertise and perspectives to contribute to the project's development. It can lead to the creation of more comprehensive and multidimensional projects that address various aspects of the subject matter.
