Lesson Plan 5

Students always struggle the most with writing the rationale and eventually lose a lot of points in the rubric for this section. If you are unsure how to guide them to write a coherent rationale, here is a lesson plan to help you. 

1. Students write a rationale for their project
2. Students learn how to write citations for their references

1. Computer with Internet access connected to a projector.

1. A teacher tells the class: What is the rationale? The rationale is the set of reasons provided for why your maker project/solution is important and why the problem you have selected is an important problem to solve. In the City as Lab Maker project, we will provide two kinds of reasons for doing our research –
   • Reasons why the selected problem is important to my city.
   • Reasons why the proposed solution makes sense.

We have already conducted some secondary research. We will use that research now to write our rationale. But, before we start writing a rationale, let us understand citations in a research paper.

What are citations and how to write them?

A citation is a formal reference to a published source that you consulted and obtained information from while writing your research paper. In CaL, we use the following format to write citations.

Title, Author, Website Link (for internet websites) 

Title, Author, Date of Publishing, Page Number (for books)

Example for citation: The citation is to be provided as a footnote in the Word document. See footnote below 

Let us take any research question – What percentage of buildings in BDD Chawl Worli are fire-compliant? The rationale will be written as shown below BASED on the secondary research we did:

Rationale: This question is important for Mumbai because:

1. All the buildings we live in don’t have a fixed fire fighting system (Riser Down Comer) installed. So, our buildings are not fire-compliant.  There are 144 buildings in BDD Chawl alone. Hence, our research can be important to the building society to evaluate the fire safety of the BDD Chawls.
2. Less than 1% of buildings in Mumbai are fire-compliant and there have been more than 49,000 fire incidents in Mumbai in the last decade. Therefore, our research will be important to the fire department of Mumbai as they can ensure these buildings follow fire-safety guidelines and can avoid fire incidents.

Note: The teacher will need to model how to write citations included as footnotes. The links are website addresses which can be added to text using Insert->Link feature in Word. The students were asked specifically to store the addresses of the websites they do secondary research from – those will be useful now to write citations.

1. Fire Safety Checklist for buildings, Maharastra Fire Service Department Website, Link 1b.
2. Fire Safety Checklist for buildings, Maharastra Fire Service Department Website, Link 1b.
3. History of BDD Chawls, MeMumba Blog, Link 2.
4. Less than 1% of Mumbai’s 2.98 Lakh buildings are fire-compliant, Hindustan Times, 01 Jun 2019, Link 3

Every group now writes the rationale giving two reasons for why their selected problem is important to the city (including citations) and 2 reasons why their proposed solution is a good solution. The teacher reads and approves it.