"Northface University Prepares Its Computer Science Students for the Workplace With Real-World Projects: As work moved from farms to factories in the Industrial Age of the early 1900s, there were significant changes made throughout all aspects of society, even in education. The one-room schoolhouse was replaced over time with an assembly-line model where students moved from teacher to teacher and room to room (Reigeluth and Garfinkle 1994). Efficiency was king. Now, many educational scholars and economists argue that, once more, our society has undergone massive changes, shifting from an Industrial Age to an Information Age (Reich 1991; Reigeluth and Garfinkle 1994). Survival in today’s economy requires workers who have strong critical-thinking, interpersonal and foundational skills (SCANS 1991). Our educational system is continuing to search for ways to effectively respond to the changing needs of today’s global economy. Increasingly, project-based learning is used as an instructional approach to prepare students to succeed in today’s dynamic workplaces.
Project-Based Learning Overview
In project-based learning, instruction and learning both occur within the context of a challenging project. Just as workers would encounter complicated tasks in the workplace, in a project-based learning environment, student teams are presented with complex problems that focus and act as catalysts for what they need to learn (Thomas 2000). The project, which could entail multiple problems, stimulates the learning process and gives it context. Typically, projects extend over time to act as interactive vehicles to help students acquire new, necessary knowledge and skill sets (Thomas 2000). Rather than working on a small project for a week, projects build upon . . ."