To better explain what I mean by this title, let’s go back to the story in Part 1 of this series. As I was saying, the Grade 5 gifted students were not expected to achieve the higher objectives in their projects, such as synthesis. In the end, I was one of a few students who were able to achieve the synthesis objective. For my project on the Brain and Nervous System, I decided to create an original board game where the players must learn about and better understand the nervous system in order to move ahead in the game – that is, I was communicating the information and ideas I learned in a new and original fashion.
Of course, this idea was no accident. It’s not like I was sitting around one day contemplating how to achieve the synthesis objective and the idea of a board game just popped into my head. I already knew the board game would be an acceptable idea for the synthesis objective – I had seen with my own eyes that it was.
Recall those previous two years where I went to my brother’s class’s ISP showcase. I had observed their projects and the ideas they used to complete their ISP objectives. For whatever reason, many of them chose to use board games to achieve their synthesis objectives. And while the board game idea was nothing to marvel at from an older student’s point of view, for my class that was new to the whole ISP thing, it was completely unheard of.
I was able to achieve a near perfect mark on my ISP because I was successful at completing more of the objectives than most of my peers. And I was able to do so because of my ability to observe how previous students were successful and implement those same solutions for my own problem. Not surprisingly, the other students in my gifted class caught on pretty quick, and almost everyone created a board game to achieve the synthesis objective in their ISP’s the following year.