Innovation Day Part 3 --> The Students Arrive

Original Post 7/11/13

The day finally arrived, Innovation Day.  You could feel the energy in the students, they were so excited to get started.  Students quickly divided up into their rooms based on their activities.  We have six 5th grade classrooms for the students to use and we organized them by category.  We had two rooms dedicated to technology.  Things like creating screencasts, coding video games and creating Prezis were in these two rooms. We had another room for larger construction projocts, a collaboration room where students worked together in groups of 2-3, an art room, and a quiet room where students could study and focus.  We had equal numbers of students in each room.

Students went to their rooms and got started.  I was impressed with how much work some students did before Innovation Day on their own.  One student wanted to make a model of the Statue of Liberty and he said he already built it at home once just to make sure he could it and it took him about three hours.  As I talked to him some more I realized he was worried if he would have enough time to research his project as well.  What occurred to me was this student actually gave himself homework.  He was so interested in the subject material, and so driven to be successful he did homework for three hours without a teacher telling him to.  As I walked around to other students I quickly realized he wasn't the only one.  Many students had already done research, drawings, sketches, rough drafts etc to help ensure their success on Innovation Day.

As we reached lunch it appeared most of the students were in good shape, some were a little behind, but with 30 minutes to clean up at the end I knew they could use some of that time to finish their project if they needed to.  After lunch the students got back to their projects but they were so excited about what they heard others had produced in other rooms, students were distracted.  They didn't have the same focus they did at the beginning of the day mostly because they wanted to see each other's work.  They were in awe of each other, and I really can't complain about that.

With about an hour left in the day a frenzy started to set in.  Some students were finishing early and were then able to help other students who were falling behind.  Student focus reached its zenith at this point and all but 4 students out of 129 finished their Innovation Day project by the end of the day.  Not only did they finish but what they produced was amazing.  

After we finished our Innovation Day we had the students complete a survey so we could better understand how they felt about it.  The teachers all agreed they wanted to do it again next year, but we still felt as though we needed to hear from the students first.  Below are the results of that survey.

Before conducting this survey, I was concerned that introducing the idea of Innovation Day about a month in advance may have given the students too much, and they might loose their focus.  After reading these surveys however, it seemed as though all the time was time well spent by the students, as they thought through their project ideas.  Next up, the presentation to parents.