To help students make sense of their discoveries as they tinker with bicycles and other machines, we have outlined many classroom activities. In the computer lab, students edit, illustrate, word-process, and publish the bike manual. This work includes taking digital pictures of their own recycled bikes and scanning and downloading relevant images to clarify their text. They also use the Internet to research laws, statistics, and resources for bikers in the New York City area. Our sixth graders perform on or above grade level in math and at an average of fourth or fifth grade level in reading.
Students demonstrate a wide variety of learning styles.
The focus on reading challenging texts, doing research, and developing written and oral communication skills helps English language learners reach higher performance criteria in English. The project helps to make critical and creative thinkers and problem-solvers out of students used to more traditional methods of instruction, wherein they are passive receptors of teacher knowledge. Students have time to do inquiry-based investigations with bike parts, defining and solving their own problems about what to do with the bike parts. This hands-on approach offers opportunities for kinesthetic learners to approach content through their dominant form of intelligence. Visual learners are surrounded by drawings and the objects they are studying.