Web Quest

This project was my introduction to the WebQuest as developed by Bernie Dodge and Tom March.  The goal of a WebQuest is to use Internet resources to engage students in a higher-order thinking activity with a strong inquiry component.  In my building, we have been striving to increase our use of inquiry and to find more opportunities to challenge our students with critical thinking and other high-level tasks, so a WebQuest should be an excellent fit in my classroom.

As I considered topics, I decided to incorporate an engineering task into the WebQuest.  We are working on some curriculum revisions to increase the presence of engineering in our 9th grade science courses, and one of the challenges is finding ways to ensure the science content is integrated into the engineering projects.  The research and writing components common to many WebQuests provide an excellent platform for students to explore the relationship between physical science topics and the product students design and build.  I picked one of the projects we are considering which I am most excited about, a task where students build a vehicle that will protect an egg in a head-on collision, and built a WebQuest around it.

In the Virtual Field Trip project, my first experience designing a site with multiple web pages, I spent very little time planning before I dove in and paid for that mistake by spending more time than necessary on later stages of the project.  I learned from those mistakes and, this time, tried to front-load more of the effort.  I typed out the majority of my text in Word, then sketched a basic outline for each page on a whiteboard.  This allowed me to determine in advance which tags I would need and ensure the structure of each page would be consistent across the site.  I then built the start page into Dreamweaver and wrote the majority of the CSS before beginning any of the other pages.  By front-loading my efforts with intentional planning, I spent significantly less time overall on the CSS for this page than the Virtual Field Trip, driving home the importance of planning ahead on a complex project.

Egg Crash WebQuest