Mission Topic, Purpose, and Hypothesis

George Washington Middle School doesn’t have the best intramural program…Our mission is to provide our school with a better intramural program. This means getting better coaches, better equipment, and different levels of skill on teams. Essentially, we want to upgrade from an intramural program to a competitive sports program in which we play against other schools in the area. Why do we want to do this? Well we believe that if the intramural program  changes in a positive way, then students will be happier and calmer. This could solve some behavior issues, it would give students a great way to get fit and it would be fun!

Real World Skills I’ve Learned

During this project I’ve become a much better researcher. I’ve had to search for some of the hardest things, an after school bus grant that was available to Virginians and wasn’t due in a short amount of time. I’ve developed a better ability to work with a team but it wasn’t that hard because my group was really good. I had friends in it and I was able to get to know some people much better. But with a group of friends you have to learn to stay on topic which was very hard with this particular group. Every word we read seemed to bring up a different off topic conversation. I also became better at explaining things to my group when they didn’t understand.

These skills will help me very much in my life. I will be able to find tough things on the internet which will help me everywhere I go. Though I had a good group this time I may not always have a good group and I was able to develop some great teamwork skills that I will be able to use when I get a bad group. I also will definitely need to minimize talking in the future so that was yet another skill I developed during this project. One of the other skills I can apply to the world is helping people. That is always a skill I can use. Throughout my life there will be people who will need help and this will have given me the tools I need to aid them.

Challenges We/I Encountered

This project hasn’t been easy. We have been faced with multiple challenges. Staying on topic in a group full of friends was that hardest thing by far. It definitely lowered our grade and I wish we could have done a better job of that. That brings me to my next challenge, talking. We talked soooooo much. A lot of it was on topic so we just need to work on shortening our conversations and working more. Another challenge was getting money. Finding grants, community members, and companies willing to support was so hard. It didn’t help watching all the other groups make progress. One reason getting ideas was so hard was the fact that not everyone was on the same page. Sometimes one person would think they were looking for bus grants when in actuality they had to be looking up phone numbers.

Solutions We Tried Out

To solve talking  we would need to discuss ideas in a quick yet clear way. That also solved the issue of getting everyone on the same page. Another thing I noticed was that once we had everyone on the same page they knew what they had to do and never really talked about anything but the project. So in a way we hit three birds with one stone. The only other issue was money. We think that we will have a bake sale and rally community members to help us. This is different from what the rest of the class was doing but it will get us the money that we need.

Next Steps

I sort of covered the next steps in the last sentence of the previous section but we also plan on finding GW alumni and asking them what they thought of the sports program when they were here. Using that data we can inform our community and hopefully get them on board. If the students say it was good when they were here then we can use the angle of trying to get the intramural program back on its feet. If they say it was bad then we can go with the angle of making it fun and educational for the first time. No matter what, we plan to get the community on board. This way, our project can keep getting bigger and our goals can keep getting higher. Maybe, if the community really gets involved we can start a fundraiser for the program and get one of those boards where you paint the graph to show how much money you make.

Favorite Part of the Process

My favorite part of this project so far has been working with a group of friends doing something we all have an interest in. Watching our project grow and develop along with our interest was really cool. In the beginning we simply knew the intramural program was bad and that we needed to fix it. Now we know that we need ot pay for about 5 after school buses that cost $400 each and we have a plan to get that money. I’m really excited to see how our project looks when it is all done. I have grown to like this project and my group so much more since it started.