What is one of the most memorable projects you did in school?

For the physics olympics I built a bridge out of toothpicks. My dad (an engineer) and I discussed different tactics to make it strongest and then I built it. Anyway, my bridge was awesome. It weighed less than 300 grams, maybe it was less than 100 (I can’t remember)...but it was super light and it held almost 140 pounds. My dad came to watch me put weight on it and he was on the edge of his seat, just as scared as me when I was putting the weight on. It’s a great memory of my dad, he passed away 7 years ago, this is a special memory for me.

http://web.me.com/bluedoggiant/Phuture_Golden_Ages

that link just happens to be the project where I was with 7 girls, and the only guy, just click through the site, there is a video we made, it was about Greek times.

It was fun because of the making, the bloopers etc.

The best was a video that a few good friends of mine and I did about stress for Health class, and it was hysterical. We had someone studying and then gradually getting more and more frustrated and throwing a book across the room and throwing a tantrum as we had a Robert Stack-like narration about stress and how dangerous it is in the foreground. For stress relievers, we demonstrated, among lots of other things, a bath: Barbie in the bathroom sink full of bubbles, lots of candles, and we taped a piece of index card colored black over her boobs like a censor bar. It was awesome.

One of my most memorable is probably the autobiography that we had to write for our 9th-grade English class. It had to have a visual component too, so I made a playbill for Sarah! The Musical with all sorts of stuff about the story of my life in it (ads for my favorite foods, list of donors made up of people who had a significant impact on my life, that sort of thing…).

I don’t know that the project we were given was all that exciting, but I always tried to make things more interesting so that doing the work wouldn’t be too boring…

In Science class we where leaning the difference in endothermic and exothermic and were issued a challenge to make a box that would, and I quote, ”...burst into flames when a simple heat lamp was introduced…” and you would get an A on the final, and not need to take it.
There were a few restriction, obviously, but the only one I can remember at this time was, no gases could be involved.
Anyway, my box did burn eventually, but it took a few minutes, so I didn’t get the reward, however, my friends box, which was some match heads in some other material, went up in seconds. It was great cause the fire-alarm went off.
The teacher later admitted he didn’t think anyone could do it, but my friends dad was a physics major, and help him make it.

An automated can crusher. It could differentiate between aluminum and steel and crush a can almost completely flat.

I remember working with my dad on a scale model of the Panama Canal with plexiglass that ended up being about five feet long.

But Poofandmook just reminded me of the video my friends and I did for extra credit for health class. It was really a lot of fun because we created a mock interview with a “famous professor” who was my buddy with his hair all powdered and sprayed into a crazy position. We even had a bunch of fake commercials that were just oof the wall.

It was all pretty much improvised once we got the initial setup and I remember at one point my buddy explaining why sex feels so good and using his fingers to simulate intercourse.

I made a scale model of the Pope’s library as represented in some book we read in Spanish 4. The teacher liked it so much she asked if she could keep it.

A travel brochure that I had to create when I was in about 4th or 5th grade. I still have it. I chose Peru because it seemed to exotic.
I cut pictures out of National Geographic and other magazines and built my brochure.
It makes me smile, even now many (many) years later.

Mine has to be in 4th grade (I believe) for the “gifted” class. We had to build our own kites, but the kite had to have something weird or unique about it. It also had to fly. I decided to build a box kite and I made it three times as big as the original plans. The thing was six feet long, and three feet on each side of the cube. It flew, but not for long! My dad helped me build it and the funniest part of the whole experience was watching him haul ass trying to get the thing up in the air! We held on to it for a long time, but I have no idea where it is anymore.

@supergirl Great question!

Either the California Mission or the salt and flour map of California I created in 5th grade.

I did my science project in either 7th or 8th grade, on the adhesiveness of band aids, and which was the best. I obviously did not win.
I also recall making cereal boxes of historical figures. I can’t for the life of me remember who I did. I even called my mother and she doesn’t remember either! This will bother me for a long time.
Oh, and I made a diorama of dinosaurs once, out of clay. It was a lot of fun. My father always helped me with projects.

Aluminium oxie + barium + something else which results in some awesome explosion. I somewhat like experiments and projects that lead to distruction. Probably because my life as been a boring one all the while. Another chemical process that is exciting to do is to add Barium to water… which suppose to produce some sort of explosion as well.

The freakin frog. We had to dissect a frog and record a lot of things. One of the things was all the frogs were supposed to have ovaries full of eggs but mine was the only virgin in the group-no eggs and the the ovaries were so small even the teacher had a hard time finding them. The whole dissection was a total failure, I ended up copying my friend’s drawing because I didn’t recognize anything in my frog. The final part of the project was to turn in the skeleton of the frog. OMG-the smell. Luckily we had a summer kitchen at the back of the house where I could boil it. I don’t know how I passed Biology.

I remember this one project in I think 4th grade. It was creating your dream job, and it was so memorable because of the job I chose. I chose ‘Theme Park Manager.’ or owner or something. Anyway we also had to say how we acquired this job, for my explanation of how I got this job as theme park owner I said I won the lotto and won somewhere around 5mill. Every time I think of it I look back and laugh at how imaginative I was… (PS: I called the theme park Candy Island.)

The “real” volcano we made in 5th grade…memorable because…it was a volcano!

The topographical map of Greece I made in 7th grade…with water & all. Memorable because I used so many mediums and because it took a month.

The research project on Anne Frank that shook me to the core as I sat in the library reading about the statistics and survivors accounts.

Dissecting a frozen cat that my freak of a teacher thought was hysterically funny – until I threw up on his shoes!

Ahhhhh, to be young again!

….Both projects that come to mind for me are rather embarrassing and make me seem like I am not terribly bright, but I feel like it’s unfair to only put the brilliant projects on here.

In Middle School we were forced into doing the Science Fair. I decided to do a study on bread mold…I was seeing which types of bread (Pumpernickel, White, Wheat, etc.) molded fastest. I placed several pieces of each type of bread onto a board and stored it so that I could observe them and keep a log of progress…...Apparently our house is very dry and not conducive to mold because, despite living in a humid climate and having the bread out for WEEKS, by the end of the assignment I could glue several of my “examples” onto the presentation board because, instead of molding, they all became bread slice BRICKS….

My second memorable project was also for science…we were given a pot, some soil, and a seed and we were supposed to write a “Plant Log” taking down the history of the growth of the plant…..My log became an epic tale of failure and my own insistence on not writing something boring (even at the age of 9 I was determined to write something worthwhile) kept my log from being “Day 1: Nothing, Day 2: Nothing” – In fact…I got an ‘A’ on the assignment because it made my teacher laugh out loud. Instead of the obvious “Nothing” that would result from my epic failure at being able to grow ANYTHING, I had entries like “Day 6: I SEE A GREEN!!! Oh wait…never mind…that was a fuzzy….sigh” and “Day 7: While observing my plant I….ZZzzzzzzz…sorry…I…wait…what was I saying?” My mother might actually still HAVE my plant log because she thought it was a brilliant example of my failure at growing things and my calling being something related to communication and writing.

A “Stranded on a deserted island” unit where everyone in the class had a character, and was shipwrecked together. We then had to organise ourselves and figure out what was necessary for survival, elect leaders, etc. But the cumulation of the project was the building of this island model, which we discovered, was actually a dormant volcano. And our teacher put together a concoction of ketchup and baking soda (something like that) and we had a volcanic explosion on the model. This was in Primary three and I still remember it quite vividly.

Designing and making ‘blue-prints’ for my dream house. I think I was in 7th or 8th grade, and it was a big art project. Of course I designed a very unrealistic mansion. On the upper level, in addition to the usual luxurious bath, I had a huge plant room. Skylights and walls of windows, a waterproof tile floor with a drain in the middle. Looking back on that makes me chuckle… I have the brownest thumb ever! @hitomi and I would be terrible farmers! The best room in the house was the library, of course. I still have the plans.

My 8th grade class created a series of “radio” programs for the morning announcements in the spring. We were split into groups and had to come up with a 5-minute play. My group’s got censored because we had a couple of lines in it that talked about drinking and referred to Jack Daniels by name, but it was only a set up for a cheap joke about Charlie Daniels and the song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” The joke didn’t work. We hadn’t time to fix it.

Yet a thinly-veiled (to us) reference to an affair we thought was happening between two administrators that a couple of us had seen necking after school one day somehow got through! Both of them were married. To other people. Oooooooooohh!

When I was in sixth grade, we were partnered with a classmate for a project about the Aztec gods. I was partnered with the class bully and underachiever. While he had never bothered me, I was pissed that I had to work with such a dumb jerk.

“We” made a paper mache sculpture of the head of Quetzalcoatl. Or rather, I made it. I think we did it at my house, and he would come over and basically watch as I did the work. We had to present a paper about it, too, and he contributed nothing to that.

I was very proud of the statue, and kept it around for years, but it must have been thrown out at some time. I’ll never forget having to work with that boy. It’s one of my few memories of elementary school. The other being the time I accidently kicked Miss Dimetryk in the ankle. Unless, that was my seventh grade social studies teacher, when I gave a presentation about the Czechoslovakian rebellion in 1968.

ye olde mousetrap car

One of my close friends and I did a report comparing and contrasting the 7 Year War and World War II. But just doing a typical class report would be totally lame and boring, so we wrote songs comparing and contrasting them to the tunes of well known songs (the ants go marching, farmer in the dell, etc.). Then we made sock puppets to sing them and filmed the entire thing.

I should mention singing was not something either of us particularly excelled at.

@augustlan I used to love designing dream houses! I never did one for a school project, but I would steal my mom’s graph paper and spend hours creating the perfect house. Mine always had a huge library and a kitchen that opened into the dining room and giant windows looking out on the backyard (which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what my husband and I are looking for in our house-hunting right now!)

Never had a garden, though – I knew at the age of 6 that I would kill any plant i touched… ;)

@sdeutsch – Graph paper was a lot of fun! I used to make mazes over the whole page and then photocopy them for my friends at my dad’s office. I guess that was sort of a school project…

@fireside Ooooh, I loved making mazes too – I had forgotten about that! I used to draw huge mazes and then make my mom and dad solve them – they got sick of solving them long before I got sick of drawing them… =)

In like 5th grade we were learning about explorers and I made a board game based around Captain Cooks life. It was awesome you would roll the dice and pick cards and they would tell you what to do like you got scurvy move back two spots and i had the spaces laid out across a map of the world. I’ve always loved maps and the idea of exploring the world so this just furthered my interest.

Also in middle school we had to create an artifact from the Egyptian empire so I picked King Tuts headdress. It was cool because in order to get the right shape for the face my Dad put wet plaster all over my face and molded it to me then we let it dry and added all the ornaments and painted it and everything, my teacher thought it was the coolest thing ever… and it was

In sixth grade we did a lot of art work, which I loved. One of the greatest and messiest projects was to make candles. We brought in empty milk cartons and set wicks into them. The teacher poured in candle wax in our choice of several colors. When the candles had thoroughly hardened, we peeled away the molds.

And then—the best part! We brought our mothers’ egg beaters to school. We set up little cardboard-and-newspaper walls around our individual work areas at big tables, covered the floor with newspaper and ourselves with smocks, and whipped bowls full of plain paraffin until it was frothy snowy white like whipped cream. Then we dabbed it onto the pillar candles, where it stuck, and poured glitter all over them before they hardened. What fun! This creation was our family Christmas centerpiece for years.

A decade later, I recreated the whole experience at my sister’s apartment, and it worked just as I had remembered.

I put together a fun thing for a 5th grade science class I was teaching one year. We were learning about elements and compounds. I came up with an idea to get different colored gum balls (there are 7) and designate each color a specific element. White was oxygen, blue was hydrogen, etc. Then, using a hot glue gun, I had the kids assemble a compound of their choice. Water, for example, would have one blue gumball, and two white gumballs glued together. Their favorite was baking soda cause it was HUGE! And used all of the elements available in the form of gumballs we had!

I got to take part in a canoe trip for a summative project. It was really fun and I learned a lot. The memories from that trip still stick with me to this day. At times, it was very challenging, but I made it back in one piece.

A social studies project in 6th grade that I absolutely loved doing. We had an amazing social studies teacher, and we had to create our own city. Just pure creation and imagination. Everyone loved the project. We didn’t physically have to build anything, but we wrote about how it was founded, what the names of different structures were, and our own name. The only thing that was based on the real world was the location. We had to create our cities in the Caribbean. It was just awesome. I’m not explaining it right. It was more fun than it sounds.