What we do?
Students in grades 3-12 and higher ed, use a visual collaborative workspace to work together on self-directed problem solving. Equipped with powerful knowledge creation and visualization tools, Project Pals encourages students to demonstrate their knowledge and thought processes by asking questions, creating project assets in the interactive workspace, engaging in computational thinking by breaking down problems into component parts and documenting processes and timelines of events. Students also learn to identify relationships by building mind maps and reach reasoned conclusions by identifying patterns, comparing and contrasting information and creating a structured analysis.Teachers leverage easy to use tools to organize, monitor, coach and assess projects at scale. Project Pals’ analytics tools enable teachers to track student individual contributions in a group project, adding transparency and accountability to collaborative problem solving.
Why we do it?
Today’s students are stepping into an era characterized by an explosion of scientific knowledge and a growing array of complex societal problems. The workplace they will be headed to has transformed into a place where less supervision, more autonomy, more collaboration, and less predictability mean that learning to solve problems, think critically, communicate, collaborate, and innovate are becoming the most important assets that students can gain for their future. By bringing real-life context and technology to the curriculum through a PBL approach, Project Pals is helping students develop strong problem solving skills, work productively in groups and adapt to novel situations. Through the use of our platform, students become familiar with collaborative problem solving and project management methodologies that are increasingly valuable in modern workplaces.