PBL MEE Project Ideas

Step 1: Engage with Problems

Craft an engaging scenario or problem. You need not limit yourself to problems or issues that arise in your community. Use local news, as well as news sources online such as Dogo News, Newsela, or Newseum. Combine tools like Summarize This or Read & Write to to help transition students to make their research process visible.

When selecting a video or news story, search for one that is aligned to the TEKS Standards.

Step 2: Explore Student Thinking with Videos

As we explore student thinking, you can quickly make thinking visible with video. Encourage students to “think, plan, investigate, and organize collected information” with either Flipgrid.com.

Both offer opportunities for students to share their reflections and research take-aways.

Encourage students to snap pictures in Minecraft: Education Edition (MCEE), write a short description of those, and then export the images. This makes it easy to collect the information into a slide show and have students record audio reflections describing what they learned as a narrated slideshow.

Step 3: Explain Learning Take-Aways

In this step, students can use a tool like Shadow Puppet EDU, Toontastic, Google Slides with Screencasting tools, or Powerpoint to create some type of media (e.g. audio, narrated slideshow, video) that shares their learning.

The main goal is to externalize their thinking and learning process in such a way that helps others understand it.

Step 4: Elaborate with Paper Slides

In this step, have students apply their new insights and framework to a new idea. One approach involves creating a narrated slideshow with paper slides, where students storyboard their application of a newly developed problem-solving process to an existing problem. Their illustration of the problem helps them see what is happening, bringing order to chaos. Then, video record a paper slide of the process as students explain their thinking.

Step 5: Evaluate with Quizziz or Kahoot!

In this step, students are expected to take evaluation to the next level. Rather than the teacher creating a Kahoot! or Quizziz type assessment, students reflect on the process they have gone through and then create an assessment to offer others who are learning from them. The assessment serves as a reflective measure for the solution developers and for others who seek to learn from the solution or apply it.

Project Task Cards


What would your lesson look like?

  1. Divide up into teams of 3-5 people
  2. Develop your own scenario for using a lesson you know about of your own work or adapt one from MEE lesson plan collection
  3. Submit your group's lesson online