The 20% Project is your chance to learn about something that you are personally interested in, intrigued by, and/or are passionate about. For the rest of the year, you will be given 20% of class time to work on your project, which will be worth 20% of your final grade.

Challenges include: balloon tower, index card tower and paper chair challenge!
I suggest discussing which 21st century skills will be needed to do each activity before students do it, and then use them to reflect after the challenges. In the past when this was done, I used SECRET skills to do this.

Students are presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they are biomedical engineers asked to design artificial hearts. Using the engineering design process as a guide, the challenge is established and students brainstorm to list everything they might need to know about the heart in order to create a complete mechanical replacement (size, how it functions, path of blood etc.). They conduct research to learn the information and organize it through various activities. They research artificial heart models that have already been used and rate their performance in clinical trials. Finally, they analyze the data to identify the artificial heart features and properties they think work best and document their findings in essay form.

The inspiration for this site came from John Allen Paulos' book Innumeracy. From it Fawn Nguyen took the mathematical fun facts, etc. and created middle school mathematics critical thinking problems that relate to ratios and proportional reasoning and require students to compare stuff and really get them thinking.

Here's an example:
Tortoises have the longest lifespan among vertebrates, about 200 years.

A fruit fly's lifespan is about 45 days.
​
If we scaled both lifespans down so that a tortoise's 200 years is now 1 day, then what is the fruit fly's lifespan, in seconds?

Lead the new generation of curious explorers!

Create a well-rounded education with free lessons, activities, games and more! From social studies to world languages to SEL, Carmen Sandiego inspires curiosity in every subject.

Lead students through over 100 classroom activities inspired by the new Netflix series.

Travel the world with Carmen and our partners at Google Earth and Google Expeditions.

Resources, lessons, games and activities!

Select Resources and then you can filter by grade K-12 or activity type!

This site has an amazing variety of tools that students can use to share their learning.
Let your students have voice and choice!
Some of the best choices on this site include

FAKEBOOK - kids can make a mock facebook page ONLINE for a historical figure, or a character in a novel. Etc.

PAC MAN & ARCADE GAMES -transform your quiz into a trivia Pac Man game. The kids have to answer questions to play and if they die they must answer more questions to continue. The kids can make their own trivia games as well. This could be a great final product and you could play it on the smartboard as a class to evaluate it.

FAKE NEWS Headlines - this would be great for an important event in a novel, or current events, or historical info!

QR CODE TREASURE HUNT – no Internet needed. Kids can create these; or you could!

BURGER ESSAY PLANNER -students can plan and organized essays with the provided structure!

Other Options include: timers, turn your text into a Star Wars theme, 3D gallery, fake Twitter, random name picker, etc!

Find over 1 million free activities, simulations, exercises, lessons, and games for math & science!

Resources are organized by: Elementary, Middle School, High School & College.

CodeHS is a comprehensive teaching platform for helping schools teach computer science. We provide web-based curriculum, teacher tools and resources, and professional development.

Get your students coding in no time!
CodeMonkey is a fun and educational game-based environment where kids learn to code without any prior experience. After completing CodeMonkey's award-winning coding courses, kids will be able to navigate through the programming world with a sense of confidence and accomplishment.

FULL COURSES are available here for students.

Learn to make your own game, app, or computer drawing. (K-5)

Build real working apps, games and websites using blocks, JavaScript, CSS, HTML and more. (6-9)

Go beyond Code.org and take university courses online or learn a new programming language. (10-12)

Plus access to all the Hour of Code games/coding activities!

"All the courses on Codecademy are free. The free course catalog features hundreds of hours of content that help learners develop skills in their desired programming language. However, CodeCademy offers a “pro” option that allows tailored lessons and tutorials for the user as well as live tutoring."

You have to make an account to use this excellent site. You can learn 180 hours of content for FREE! You can sign up to do more for a cost if you wish.

Each month, we’ve selected a different theme encouraging people (like you!) to inspire your projects during our learning experiences. Here are some ideas on how you might combine your super powers and perspectives with technology throughout 2019:
A video game inspired by your findings on declining bee population
A piece of artwork to illustrate how we might learn in the future
A website to share your thoughts on food security in your community
A website to share your favourite ways to stay active in the winter season
An interactive story on how we might reduce food waste
A website to share your fun invention idea!

Codesters combines a fun online coding platform for students, a powerful learning management system for teachers, and built-out coding lessons so you can start teaching kids to code in your school today.

Microworlds is a coding platform that is free for Canadian residents and schools.

Versions are also availalbe in Cree and Ojibwe.

If you download this the book "Getting Started with Coding: Get Creative with Code" by Camille McCue

Join the communities to get free activities, resources and projects!

The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. Check out the tutorials and activities. This grassroots campaign is supported by over 400 partners and 200,000 educators worldwide.

Students can code for just an hour, or complete full courses.

The courses are in 45 different languages.

There are even coding activities that can be down without computers called "unplugged".

BBC lesson series on Computational Thinking. This series would be a good resource for teachers, and older students. The lesson provide some information, a video clip, and each section in the series has a quiz at the end to check understanding. The start of the topic is broken down into the sections of computational thinking: Decomposition, Pattern Recognition, Abstraction and Algorithms.

Crash Course Kids combines the same engaging lecture-style content delivery with animated graphics that focus on grade school science.

Topics include Earth Science, Physical Science, Biology, Geography, Engineering, and Astronomy.

These videos are amazing!

About This Workbook
The activity pages in the Critical Thinking
Workbook are meant to be shared and explored.
Use it as an electronic document or as worksheets.
You can either print off the pages and use them as
activity sheets, or you can edit them directly right in
the document on your computer.
Enjoy these fun and challenging critical
thinking activities that will get every
student thinking critically!