PROJECT BASED LEARNING (PBL)

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working
for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge.

Essential Elements of PBL include:

Significant Content - At its core, the project is focused on teaching students important
knowledge and skills, derived from standards and key concepts at the heart of academic
subjects.

21st century competencies - Students build competencies valuable for todays world,
such as problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and
creativity/innovation, which are explicitly taught and assessed.

In-Depth Inquiry - Students are engaged in an extended, rigorous process of asking

questions, using resources, and developing answers.

Driving Question - Project work is focused by an open-ended question that students

understand and find intriguing, which captures their task or frames their exploration.

Need to Know - Students see the need to gain knowledge, understand concepts, and
apply skills in order to answer the Driving Question and create project products,
beginning with an Entry Event that generates interest and curiosity.

Voice and Choice - Students are allowed to make some choices about the products to be
created, how they work, and how they use their time, guided by the teacher and
depending on age level and PBL experience.

Critique and Revision - The project includes processes for students to give and receive
feedback on the quality of their work, leading them to make revisions or conduct further
inquiry.

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Public Audience - Students present their work to other people, beyond their classmates
and teacher.

Scope of PBL:
PBL relies on learning groups. Student groups determine their projects, in so doing, they engage
student voice by encouraging students to take full responsibility for their learning. This is what
makes PBL constructivist. Students work together to accomplish specific goals.
Outcomes of PBL:
PBL is significant to the study of (mis-)conceptions, local concepts and childhood intuitions that
are hard to replace with conventional classroom lessons.

In PBL, project science is the community culture; the student groups themselves resolve

their understandings of phenomena with their own knowledge building.

Application of Technology allows them to search in more useful ways, along with getting

more rapid results.

Problem-based learning is a similar pedagogic approach, however, problem-based
approaches structure students' activities more by asking them to solve specific (openended) problems rather than relying on students to come up with their own problems in
the course of completing a project.
A meta-analysis found that when implemented well, PBL can increase long-term

retention of material and replicable skill, as well as improve teachers' and students'
attitudes towards learning.
Tasks in PBL:
The Project Based learning focuses into 4 main categories which allows the budding engineers to
do a project.
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Phase I : Applicable at Fifth Semester which focuses on Problem Identification and

Requirements gathering.
Phase II : Applicable at the Sixth Semester that focuses on analysis and design of
Prototype.
Phase III : Applicable at the Seventh Semester that enriches the coding, Implementation
and the testing perspective.
Phase IV : The Final Phase which focuses on project demonstration and Presentation.
Fields of the PBL:
The Current prototype idea works on the following broad areas of relevance:
1. Technological Improvement or research based projects: It emphasizes on improving the
technological aspect of their current Fields of Interest like Networking, Device Drivers,
APIs, Framework development.
2. Inter branch projects: here emphasis is on linkage with other branches to solve problems
apart from their current fields of Interest and idea. These make them work on Inter
disciplinary terms.
3. Industry relevant or Social Advantage projects: Here emphasis is on identifying problems
and providing customized based solutions.
NOTE: Some of the Project do interlink with these broad areas and are not to be treated
separately.
Guides will be allotted from that respective fields and are pulled through the entire four phases
of the PBL.

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How does PBL help the SDLC:

The systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred
to as the application development life-cycle, is a term used
in systems engineering, information systems and software
engineering to describe a process for planning, creating,
testing, and deploying an information system. The systems
development life-cycle concept applies to a range of
hardware and software configurations, as a system can be
composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both.
Here we observe that the SDLC is Merged with PBL in a box tight Approach including the 4
different Phases that coincide with the 4 Main Phases of the Proposed tasks.
The breakdown of Work and the Structure is also similar to SDLC and Agile project
Development. It also supports Iterative methodologies, such as Rational Unified Process and
dynamic systems development method that focus on limited project scope and expanding or
improving products by multiple iterations.
How does PBL help the Blooms Taxonomy:
Bloom's taxonomy is a way of distinguishing the
fundamental questions within the education system. It refers to a
classification of the different objectives that
educators

set

for

students

(learning

objectives). It divides educational objectives into three

"domains":

cognitive,

psychomotor
"knowing/head",
"doing/hands"

affective,

(sometimes

and

loosely

described

"feeling/heart"
respectively).

Within

as

and
the

domains,

learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at
lower levels. A goal of Bloom's taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains,
creating a more holistic form of education.
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Bloom's taxonomy is considered to be a foundational and essential element within the education
community.
The PBL approach raises the pyramids expectations (top three) of the blooms taxonomy by
providing the students with additional value which is difficult to provide with normal education
procedures.
Conclusion:
Here we have seen that PBL approaches on targeting the full development of the Student in terms
of his skills ,responsibilities etc. that boosts him forward to face global challenges in a fast
forward fashion which is the current requirement nowadays.
It does also follow the SDLC approach that is required by industries and Blooms taxonomy that
educational institutions follow which maps the bridge between education and Industry.

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