The Story Behind the Pillow Project
This school had a reputation as a leader in recycling classroom paper throughout its district. Then, last spring, a member of the school’s Recycling Squad began finding drippy juice boxes, food, tissues, and other contaminating objects in the classroom paper recycling bins. Each day this student had to go through the recycling bins weeding out the contaminating objects. The student was disgusted because, just a few months previously, the students and teachers had been recycling correctly.
The student investigated further and spoke to the school’s
custodian. The custodian reported that he used to have 10 bags of recycled
paper for the sanitation department every two weeks and now barely had
two bags for the same period of time. The student knew that the school’s
recycling program was in jeopardy and that the school’s recycling
reputation was crumbling.
| This project illustrates a standard-setting
performance for the following parts of the standards: |
|
 a |
Problem Solving: Design a product, service, or system. |
 a |
Communication: Make an oral presentation. |
 a |
Information: Gather information. |
 b |
Learning and Self-management: Keep records of work activities. |
| c |
Learning and Self-management: Identify strengths and weaknesses in own work. |
 b |
Working With Others: Show or explain something so someone else can do it. |
The student went to other members of the Recycling Squad
to help come up with a solution to the problem. The Squad decided to find
some interesting way to get teachers and students to recycle properly.
They decided to shred the recycled paper and design a desirable product
that was easy to make, strong and durable that could be made for the whole
school. After many product designs and much testing, the Recycling Squad
created the Cozy Comfort Cushion made from the shredded paper which is
stuffed in a pillowcase and secured with a rubber band. It is then decorated
with permanent magic markers.
The project took four months to complete. At the end of that period the
students had established the beginnings of a profit making business. The
Recycling Squad, a group of fourteen students, set up the initial project
by designing and setting up production in the first month. The rest of
the students in their grade, through division of labor, made the Cozy
Comfort Cushions for the entire school with enough left over to sell some
cushions for a profit. There was such excitement over this project that
students often gave up their recess time to work on the project.
The Recycling Squad met their primary goal—the students and teachers
were now recycling properly. There was also a large reduction in the amount
of paper that had to be recycled each period.
The written work produced as part of Applied Learning projects commonly
contains some errors. Documentation of these projects includes notes,
journal entries and plans that students produced as working documents
for their personal use. These kinds of documents were not prepared with
the expectation of eventual publication and they have not been revised
for inclusion in this publication.
It is expected that finished work produced as part of an Applied Learning
project will contain virtually error free writing.
What the work shows
a
Problem Solving: The student designs and creates a product, service, or
system to meet an identified need; that is, the student | • | develops ideas for the design of the product, service, or system; |
| • | chooses among the design ideas and justifies the choice; |
| • | establishes criteria for judging the success of the design; |
| • | uses an appropriate format to represent the design; |
| • | plans and carries out the steps needed to turn the design into a reality; |
| • | evaluates the design in terms of the criteria established for success. |
Previous to beginning
the Pillow Project, the school had a recycling program in place. Each
of the classes was supposed to bring their bags of recyclables to a common
place every week. Some of the younger children were having difficulty
lifting the bags and so the principal sent out a letter to the Recycling
Squad in the upper grades asking if some students could volunteer to collect
the younger students’ bags of recyclables.
The students responded to the principal’s request. When they went
around to the classrooms to pick up the containers, they began to notice
that students were throwing regular garbage into the recyclable container.
It was this discovery that prompted the pillow project as a motivation
for keeping the recyclable containers clean.
These
student logs show the students’ initial analysis of the problem they
identified and some of the ideas the students canvassed at the beginning
as possible solutions.
The students produced samples
of their ideas and evaluated each design based on criteria they had established.
| • | Easy to make |
| • | Can be quickly made |
| • | Durable |
