In a project that invites creativity and is open-ended, it's important to set realistic boundaries. For a few of the teachers at O'Farrell and for many of its students, it was difficult to stop extending and embellishing the microworlds. At some point, however, the amount of new learning that takes place reaches the point of diminishing returns. It's advisable to set a tentative project scope at the start, and to force an end to the project before the burnout point is reached. The second and third repetitions of the project were more successful in this regard because we learned from trying to do too much.
Time is precious.
In designing constructivist units, it's important to minimize time spent that doesn't contribute to learning. Students spent a great deal of time looking for information and appropriate graphics for their game. Since the settings chosen were not well documented in easily accessible books, this search time was longer than if more conventional topics had been chosen. In an improved version of the project, we would have already prepared a database of texts, graphics and sounds appropriate to the content and indexed it for easy access. In order for an innovation to become institutionalized, ownership of the idea needs to be deliberately shared .