Reflection on a Final Exam

I wrote earlier about the fact that I have to give a multiple choice test in my Biology classes.  This is not the case in my Environmental Science classes, where I am the only one teaching that particular course.  Because of the nature of my students (they repreatedly tell me how much they hate filling in bubbles for tests) and my desire to give them a challenging task that would show how they could transfer their learning to a new situation, I decided to give them a project rather than a traditional guess-fest.  You can check it out below. As with any time you first unleash a project upon your students, they're bound to discover some of the holes you're blind to when you're creating it.  You're also going to see things that you missed after you hand it out and the students start working with it - things that need tweaking as well as things that should have been left out entirely.  Since I handed it out two days ago, here are some things that need to be changed:

• Day #2 activities are too big.  I got a lot of pushback from one of my classes about how that was "too much work."  While I'm not one to cave every time I hear that (real learning *is* work, after all), after looking at those activities again and the timeline with which I have to abide, those activities could use some paring down.
  
• Speaking of that timeline, I wish that there had been more time for students to work on a presentation for this project, preferably using a tool such as WeVideo.  Instead, I had them do a lot of writing.  I think for the second semester final we wil have a continuation of this same project, only students will have to incorporate all of their second semester knowledge into designing a sustainable continent (a different one).
  
• I wish it were more realistic and problem-based.  I am going to switch to a more problem-based approach for the second semester.

But here are some things that I like:

• I like having the tasks broken out by day.  I'm not getting any "But I don't know where to start/what to do next/how do I know if I'm done" questions.
  
• I like that students have to do additional research in order to incorporate new information (this happens when they have to research specific organisms to create their food webs, researching effects of latitude on climate, etc.).
  
• I like how students actually have to use what they know.  It's not about repeating back a bunch of science at me; it's about taking what they know and transferring that to this new situation.  While sometimes that causes some frustration, I feel it's my job to help students learn how to work through that and still be productive.
  

Most of all, I like that it's not just 100 questions of content randomness distilled into bubbles.  More on this after I get finished projects.