Project Week Brings Learning to Life

Project Week provides students with a summative learning experience in lieu of traditional assessments amid one of the busiest times of the academic year. With theater performances, dance and music recitals, and tournament games already on the docket for the final week of the winter trimester, Project Week offers a welcomed reprieve from the rigors of exams while still engaging students in hands-on learning and focused reflection.

“Project Week is a wonderful time on campus,” Academic Dean Tasheana Dukuly Sanchez-Moran said. “As AI becomes more prevalent in our society and in education, it's a fantastic moment to pause and focus on experiential education — students learning through doing, creating, building, being outside, making things with their own hands.”

For students in Tom and Lyn Lord’s P’09 Decarbonize Your Life course, this meant designing climate-responsive, near net-zero residential homes integrating lessons learned throughout the trimester. Working in groups, students created miniature replicas of their designs and presented their creations to a panel of judges.

In Mathematics Teacher Carl Zent’s calculus course, students completed a time optimization problem, charting the time it takes to run a straight distance on asphalt verses a shorter, diagonal distance through snow. Students designed a function modeling the problem and then applied the first derivative test to find a solution. They then shared their solutions graphically and tested the accuracy of their predictions.

“Project week allows students to demonstrate knowledge in front of the school community rather than behind the pages of a test,” Zent said. “The goal is to create a unique experience that will resonate with students and be remembered long after their time at KUA. Projects are also quite exciting for faculty to imagine and plan.”

This year, the junior English classes utilized Project Week to tackle on of the most present topics of the junior year — how to write a compelling college essay. English teachers and college advisors partnered to offer guided workshops where they learned to develop topics, receive constructive feedback, and start a draft for their college submissions.

“The feedback from both the students and the teachers was great,” Director of College Advising Gunnar Olson said. “They read examples of "Essays that Worked," discussed prompts, and started brainstorming their own. It is much less painful to begin work on the essay now than in the fall of the senior year, and we will be working with them a number of additional times.”

Project Week also affords faculty the opportunity to facilitate class trips to engage with some of the region’s academic and cultural resources. Dustin Meltzer ’05 took his film & video production students to Junction Arts Media in White River Junction, Vermont, to screen films created by Upper Valley artists; while STEM Director Ryan McKeon’s AP computer science class traveled to nearby Dartmouth College to visit the lab of Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science Tim Pierson P’24. Foreign language instructors Enyi-Abal Koene and Tessa Cassidy used the added time for their project to prepare dishes native to France and ancient Latin speakers respectively.