Lesson Plan 1

1. Students become familiar with what City as Lab is.
2. Students define the word “research”

1. Blackboard/Whiteboard & chalk/marker, 
2. 3 Strips of papers or postits notes for each group 
3. sketch pens 
4. chart-paper 
5. pins to stick the strips/posted notes

Step 1: Concept Map (5 min):Teacher writes the word RESEARCH on the board. Students shout out the first words that come to their mind when they hear that word. If kids don’t know what it means, they can use a dictionary to get the meaning and then think of words that connect to it. This is to activate their prior knowledge and introduce the term “Research” (words you should try and get out of them – information, questions, TOPIC, answers, paper, team, inquire, investigate, explore, examine, experiment, inspect, review, etc.)

Step 2. Direct Instruction (10 min): Tells students, Research means to collect information in a SYSTEMATIC MANNER to answer a question. The word research can be broken up into RE and SEARCH, which means to search over and over again. When we do research, we start with a question that we want to know the answer to. 

For some questions, we can just ask our friends, family or the teacher to get the answer e.g., how do I go to the zoo? For some questions, we can open the textbook, or go online to get the answer easily e.g., how many planets are there in our solar system? For other questions, there is no right answer e.g., what tastes better: five star or dairy milk? We want to avoid opinion based questions.

We are not talking about those types of questions. We are talking about questions where we have to collect/gather some information from many places or many times and then use that information to answer the question. Let us see some examples:

• What percentage of students  in this school bring their own lunchbox? This is a good research question. Why? (get responses). We have to go to different classrooms and talk to many different students to get this information. We have to go to different places many times to collect information and we have to do it systematically. We have to tally how many boys and how many girls bring and how many do not bring their own lunchboxes and then find the ratio based on total number of students.

Here are some RQs of CaL FInalist groups from the last five years:

• How does different packaging affect the price and level of adulteration of milk sold in the market?
• Is Jijamata Udyan capable of keeping wild animals?
• What is the effect of noise pollution due to traffic on hearing ability of shopkeepers as compared normal citizens?

Step 3. Small Group Discussion (5 min): Teacher divides the class into small groups. Write 6-8 questions on the board. Groups discuss and choose which one is a good research question and which isn’t, and why.  Given below are some questions. Choose any you like or add your own.

• Why is the sky blue? (no)
• Which area in Mumbai/Delhi is the most polluted? (yes)
• How many hours/day of water supply do different communities in Mumbai get? (yes)
• Do people prefer diesel or petrol cars? (no)
• How many new voters voted for the first time in my constituency? (yes)
• How many restaurants in my city as pet-friendly? (yes)
• What ae the main sources of water for my city? (no)
• Is there a difference in water quality across my city? (yes)
• How do trees grow? (no)
• At what time is there the worst traffic in my area? (yes)
• Do animals like to live in the zoo (no)
• How many restaurants are following the plastic straw ban? (yes)

Step 4. Whole Class Discussion (10 min): Teacher goes through each question on the board and discusses if it is a good research question or not with the class. 

Step 5. Direct Instruction (10 min): Teacher introduces City as Lab project. Use the presentation provided. Ensure you get students EXCITED about the project.

You will be conducting research on our city or community-place where we live. You have to come up with research questions about our city. The project is called City as Lab because it forces us to think about our city as scientists and the whole city becomes a lab to do research and to conduct experiments. We will meet every week for 45 minutes and I will be guiding you through the research. This is a group project and at the end of this project, each group will submit a paper. The CaL team will select ten teams from across India to present at a conference in Mumbai or Delhi!