8. Projects, student data and ethics¶
Why projects¶
Every unit ends with a project, and every grade has a flagship project:
| Grade | Flagship |
|---|---|
| 8 | Our class, our school — a survey + district table → poster with claim and evidence |
| 9 | Which districts are changing? — district tables → poster + SQL report |
| 10 | Air in my city — a year of PM2.5 → report or dashboard |
| 11 | Climate or weather? — trend with uncertainty, reproducible in Git |
| 12 | Capstone with a client — scoping, model or analysis, audit, handover, public write-up |
Projects are where students practise the whole cycle, make decisions with no single right answer, and produce something they can show. They also make the oral check meaningful.
Running a project well¶
- Same five headings (PPDAC) every time, from Grade 8 to 12; students learn the structure once.
- Plan card first (question, data, variables, rate, risks); approve it before data work starts.
- Groups of three with rotating roles; individual accountability through the oral check and a personal reflection.
- Milestones (plan → clean data + log → analysis → draft poster → final) with quick feedback at each.
- Rubric shared at the start (
docs/pedagogy/assessment.md; capstone rubric in the capstone kit). - Exhibit: gallery walk, school assembly, a parents' day, or (with consent) the student gallery in the repository.
Good project questions¶
- local, specific, answerable with available data, and genuinely interesting to students;
- about a group and variation (Grade 8 Unit 2);
- one sentence long.
Avoid questions that need private data, that rank individuals, or that could embarrass groups of students.
Student data: consent and privacy¶
Class surveys are the most engaging data — and the most sensitive. Use the consent form in
community/student-data-consent.md and these rules:
* collect only what the question needs;
* codes, never names; the teacher keeps any key and destroys it at the end;
* aggregated results only in posters; small-group rule (no group smaller than 5);
* no photos of identifiable students without consent;
* sensitive topics (health, family income, caste, religion, disability) only with a strong reason, parents' consent and
head teacher approval — usually better to use synthetic data;
* delete raw data at the end of the year.
Real clients (Grade 12)¶
The capstone kit (curriculum/grade-12/capstone-kit/) has a client brief, data-agreement template, model-card template
and rubric. Teacher's responsibilities:
* approve every client and project;
* make sure no personal data reaches students without a signed agreement, head teacher approval and guardian consent
where students appear; prefer aggregated or synthetic data;
* manage expectations: students deliver what they can in the time; a simple, honest result is a success;
* review public write-ups before publication.
Ethics is not a separate lesson¶
Ethics appears in every grade (Grade 8 Unit 8, Grade 10 Unit 6, Grade 12 Unit 5) — but its real home is in every lesson's reflection question and every project's limits box. Model it: when you present data, say who is missing.
Academic honesty and AI¶
See chapter 10. In short: disclose AI help in one line, and every project includes an oral check.