"Awesomeness" Projects!

So, when I made up my grading scale in August, I left 5 points for "awesomeness", which I didn't define very well. Here's my description from my assessment document:
Awesomeness:

• It’s not extra credit - I expect all of my students to show some evidence of awesomeness.
• It’s intentionally vague - I don’t know exactly how students are going to be awesome, so they will have to come up with what this looks like, and convince me, on their own.
• It’s probably different for everyone - Are you a great artist? Love writing poetry? Like tinkering or building? Spend all of your free time on the computer? OK, do something awesome for math class with that.

The idea was, I think, that students would have to figure this out for themselves and come up with something on their own. That didn't end up happening, so I didn't count the points first semester. But for some reason, things just clicked together for me at the end of second semester, and I was able to come up with 3 "Awesomeness" projects, one for each of my classes, to make the last thing the ss do in my class this year something AWESOME! This will be a series of 3 posts sort of chronicling each.

Part ​1: Graph My Room!

Senior "Foundations" class ended up on 3D graphing at the end of the year, and ss had a really hard time visualizing and conceptualizing 3D spaces. We did tons of activities, made 3D coordinate planes, even installed semi-permanent x/y/z axes in my classroom. When we were getting ready for our last summative assessment, one of the students, being a senior, asked, "can we just, like, do a project or something instead of a test for this?" So I, after a little bit of mwahaha, said, "OF COURSE WE CAN!!!" Then I came up with this:

​​Final Awesomeness Project- Graph My Room!
Using isometric graphing paper, make an accurate scale drawing of my classroom. Use your drawing to find the following.
A. The distances PQ and RT (These points will be posted around the classroom).
B. The equations of all of the planes that make up the walls, floor, ceiling.
Prepare all of this in a poster.
Scoring: 
There are 5 awesome points available. 
1-2. Distances are within 50 cm of the actual distance
3. Plane equations are accurate
4. Working for the above is clear
5. The poster is awesome!

About 4-5 class periods to get this done, with varying levels of success. A few notes on the process:

• most ss had trouble just figuring out what to measure just to get started. ie: many started by measuring lengths of walls rather than distance from axes. The x/y lines up with my floor tiles, so I clued them in to this pretty early on just to save us all a lot of trouble.
• weirdly prevalent trouble with units! STILL TROUBLE WITH UNITS!! Lots of "3 meters 24 inches" or "8.7 feet"... Scale on the graphs was also tricky...
• Z axis was nearly insurmountable as an obstacle; they just couldn't visualize it. 
• Coordinates proved to be a real challenge. Spent significant time walking from the origin to the corners of the room to find coordinates for the corners
• graphed floor in two dimensions, figured out z coordinate, sketched on isometric paper, then just went "up" the height of the ceiling.
• One group got right to work, asked about units, and (with a little point in the right direction) decided on cm based on the requirements.
• Second group had some trouble getting into it. Before I knew it they were measuring in inches and then dividing by 20 to come up with their own scale (based on ?). I thought this approach was strange, but it made sense to them, sort of.

Day project was due, getting creative to find RT distance. Cm group was within about 20 cm. Inches group was nowhere close.

The final products, and probably the last posters I'll hang this year (sniffle).

Reflection:
I've spent this year really focusing on summative assessment. For the last few months, I've been thinking a great deal about formative assessment, and changing the way I introduce students to concepts, figure out what they know and what they need some help with, and move towards a goal. 
In hindsight, this project feels to me like it could have been THE UNIT rather than something we did at the end. I have dreams of one day having a good, meaty problem to START. Create the headache, etc.
I'm really starting to think this is going to be my focus for next year, and I'm pretty excited about it.
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