Public Pupil Pizza Project

Note: The development of this concept has moved to the Effective Education Project. This page is being left for archive purposes.

Introduction

Nearly everyone knows that it is imperative that students in today’s schools learn knowledge and skills to help them in the modern information based economy. Yet most people also recognize that our schools are not optimally fulfilling this need, and that there is a gap between the theoretical academics primarily taught in the U.S. School systems and the needs of the marketplace. While the Public Pupil Pizza Project has a funny name, it is quite serious in being a beginning in bridging this gap.

Too often there is an argument about whether we should teach academics or teach vocational skills. This argument is not needed, as this project will demonstrate both can be taught and both can improve the learning in each area.

The Public Pupil Pizza Project (or Pizza Project for short) is a series of curriculums that teach students traditional academics such as English, Math, and Public Speaking while at the same time teaching students how they can use these in the real world, and simultaneously learn technology tools to accomplish this need.

It is our hope that this project will spawn other projects that follow similar methodologies to enhance learning overall. We chose "pizza" as our subject because it is a topic that is not only understood by most Americans, but is also a food eaten worldwide, and eating is one of the most fundamental of human needs. Further, Pizza, along with some other foods, such as ice cream, lend them selves to teaching certain geometry topics such as the area of a circle for pizzas, or the volume of a sphere and cone for ice cream.

Goals

This project has several goals it would like to accomplish:

• Teach Traditional Academics to Recognized Standards
• Teach Real World Skills that give students a competitive advantage in the marketplace
• Use True Real World Examples as much as possible (changing names, etc for privacy)
• Move students beyond simply repeating what is in the curriculum to being able to create their own ideas
• Be accessible to all American and World Wide Teachers and Students
• Be adopted by many teachers and schools throughout the U.S. and World.

Strategies

In order to accomplish the goals of this project the following strategies will be used:

• Use Wikiversity as a collaborative ground to create the curriculums
• Attempt to stay as vendor neutral as possible and non-comercial
• Have the curriculums and information available through a free license so any school may use it
• Get support from notable people in education, politics, and business to promote the curriculums
• Get support from public media, such as PBS to support and promote the curriculums
• Utilize the Systems And Tools Educational Model to provide a framework for creating curriculums

Structure

The different curriculum will be written as a story that follows the life of a pizza restaurant. The curriculum will demonstrate how the academics can be applied to real world situations, and further why the academics are important. To also help demonstrate this process, a competitor will be shown through the different stories, and the competitor will misapply the academics, and the consequences to the competitors business will be shown. This way students can learn both through seeing success, and seeing the potential failure. The students will be creating their own business throughout each curriculum, and applying what they learn to their own ideas.

Specific Curriculums

The following are the specific projects for learning:

• Pre-Algebra and Spreadsheets
• Processes and Analysis with Databases
• English and Word Processing
• Public Speaking and Presentations
• Publicity and Desktop Publishing