On May 24, NSLI-Y Taiwan students gave presentations on their final projects at the 2015 iEARN Taiwan Project-Based Learning (PBL) Event. The students had started their final projects back in January, and after months of research, writing, meetings, and rehearsals, the students finally showed off the fruits of their labor.
The PBL presentations were a culmination of all the students’ learning, experiences, and growth in Taiwan. They also allowed the students to utilize their language and cultural skills in order to delve even deeper into Taiwanese culture. In researching their final projects, students created questionnaires and interviewed local Taiwanese people, all in Chinese. Some students went and experienced their cultural topics firsthand. For Freya’s project on the differences between Eastern and Western massage, she went to several foot massage parlors to experience it herself and talk to the owners and other customers. For Brendan’s project on fortune telling, he went to the night market to not only observe the different fortune telling methods in Taiwan, but also to get his own fortune told.
The students’ presentations were each about five minutes long, followed by Question and Answer sessions in which they fielded judges’ questions about their projects, also done completely in Chinese. The fact that the students were able to give such high quality presentations in Chinese (and write accompanying research papers more than 1,000 characters long) is a testament to their hard work and impressive skills. Several of the students earned the highest scores and highest honor awards, while the rest earned the second highest honor awards. View a clip from Haleigh’s presentation on “Learning English in Taiwan” and Ryan L.’s on “Kaohsiung’s History and Potential Future” below.