To present their understanding of the digestive system, sophomores in Mrs. Adrienne Brown’s fourth period Medical Terminology class are creating gingerbread men to show the different parts of the digestive system.

“I think that students grasp onto information better when they get a hands-on experience,” Brown said. “Learning about the body can be boring and lengthy, so I wanted to create an activity where it would get the students more engaged.”

When the project started, Brown’s fourth period class was supposed to make a walkthrough diorama of the digestive system. Once problems came up with the walkthrough projects, Brown and her students had to come up with a solution.

“My group and I were trying to figure out with my group how to make a walk-through diagram work and we couldn’t come up with any ideas,” sophomore Gerardo Hernandez said. “We tried to think of a Christmas theme we could do and then we thought of the class making gingerbread men.”

Each gingerbread family member was designed as a certain part of the digestive system. At the end of the project, teams presented their gingerbread men to the class. Each team had a time limit of three minutes to present their project.

“I enjoyed doing this project a lot,” sophomore Aevamickayla Pearson said. “By working with other people it allowed us to gain a better perspective of how other people learn and interpret things. I was really proud of my group because I feel like we all contributed a lot to create a very unique gingerbread man.”

At the end of the project, each team described their portion of the digestive tract to the class.

“Since we go to a project-based learning school I try to incorporate a lot of projects in my lessons,” Brown said. “I have seen my students benefit a lot from doing projects and there will definitely be more projects like this in the future.”

[poller_master poll_id=”798″ extra_class=””]