The Group 4 Project is an interdisciplinary project for IB students taking Group 4 sciences, which are usually Biology, Chemistry and/or Physics. The goal of the project is to develop a broad and practical understanding of science, and to provide a personal interaction mark for your Internal Assessment in Group 4 classes.
For many IB students, this will be a “fun” project which tests your well-developed social skills.
Now, the goal of this post is to provide you with an example of how to document your Group 4 Project. Since you don’t have to send any “physical proof” to the IB about this project, you will instead have to write a short summary and logbook about your progress in the Group 4 project as “documentation” — sort of like your CAS journal.
In this Group 4 logbook, try to record your ideas, writings, notes, results, plans, meetings, etc. so that you and someone else can understand what happened in the project. Make sure it is detailed, but there’s no need to describe every single detail; usually a couple of paragraphs will suffice
This is an example of a Group 4 logbook for the Solar Flares project my group did.
PS: Here’s a blog post on the code used in the computer program for my group’s project.
PPS: Here’s a link to a comic about interdisciplinary thinking from Group 4.
Project members: Sumaira, Taras, Roya and Brian
Project members absent for most of Group 4: Steven and Anthony
MONDAY, JANUARY 11, 2010
Members Present: Steven, Taras, Brian, Roya
After some collective discussion, space was selected as the general theme for the Group 4 presentations.
On this day, we had our first group meeting, and we established our topic: solar flares/coronal mass ejections. After considerable discussion, we determined the main components of our project. The physics aspect would involve the particles released by the solar flare and their reaction with the magnetic field. The chemistry aspect would involve the ionization of the upper atmosphere and the flare’s effect on our atmosphere/ozone layer. Finally, the biology aspect would involve the flare’s effects on life on Earth and in space (eg. astronauts on the International Space Station). Theoretically, Steven would be the best candidate for the physics aspect, all group members would be suitable for the Chemistry aspect, and Roya and I would be the most suitable people to do the biology aspect. However, we still needed to divide this project into non-subject groups in order to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of Group 4. Therefore, we decided to go home and do some research on solar flares in order to solve this problem.
Length: 1 hour
MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 2010
Members Present: Steven, Taras, Brian, Roya, Anthony
We each did some research at home in the intervening week, and Roya brought some printouts of her research to the meeting. Essentially, this was a followup meeting to last week’s meeting, since it allowed us to solidify our roles and establish our topic more firmly. We decided to choose solar flares, instead of solar flares/coronal mass ejections. Furthermore, we decided to focus on the nature, causes, significance and impact of solar flares, and determined that each subsection would integrated all 3 sciences if possible. At this meeting, Anthony was added to our group, and we delegated him to do some solar flares-related research. By the conclusion of this meeting, we handed in our yellow form detailing our Group 4 project structure. This allowed us to progress forward into action.
Length: 0.5 hours
FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 2010
Members Present: Taras, Brian, Roya
In order to progress into the action phase, we decided to have a group meeting at the University of Regina library from 10 AM – 1 PM. However, Steven and Anthony did not show up.
While at the University of Regina, we borrowed some laptops and accessed some scholarly databases for scientific research into solar flares. While doing research, we discussed themes and plans for implementation. In addition, I realized that a computer program would be quite beneficial for this task, so I embarked on that adventure after that meeting. I decided to choose Microsoft Visual C# Studio Express Edition 2008 as my developing environment for this program.
By the end of the meeting, we managed to further solidify our project and began to type up our each individual section for the project.
Length: 3 hours
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010
Members Present: Brian, Roya, Sumaira
Taras was absent for the weekend because of a speech competition, and Steven was about to depart for Cuba. Anthony had apparently left for a cruise to a tropical destination. This left the group with a critical human resources shortage. After lengthy discussions with Sumaira, she decided to join our group in order to alleviate our critical personnel shortage.
We did more research at the University of Regina library and decided to restructure our group project plan in order to accommodate the departure of a couple of our valued group members. We decided that the project would focus around 4 main questions: what are solar flares? What are the causes of solar flares? What is the importance of solar flares/ What are some historical examples of solar flares? The main theme would be the significance and importance of solar flares in relation to humanity.
I had finished preliminary parts of the program, such as the energy calculator and the first quiz question. These parts allowed the user to calculate the energy released by a solar flare, and it allowed them to test their knowledge of solar flares. Several hours were spent at home to reach this stage, and a couple dozen more hours are likely needed to finish the program completely.
By the end of this meeting, we emerged with a greater sense of understanding in regards to the project, and a renewed determination to accomplish our mission, despite the personnel shortage.
Length: 3 hours
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010
Members Present: Sumaira, Roya, Taras, Brian
During the half-day, we decided to remain behind and create a model of the Sun, which would be useful to explain the magnetic field which surrounds the Sun. In order to do this, we first needed to paper-mache a basketball, which would be the Sun, and paint it at a later date.
In order to do this, group members brought supplies (such as flour, hair dryer, basketball, etc). We did run out of flour, and Mr. Prakhya assisted us in remedying this problem. Once we had sufficient materials, we paper-mached the basketball. This took a couple of hours since we had to find all the supplies and blow-dry the basketball in order to avoid mould.
We still needed to complete all of our individual sections, and we still needed to paint the basketball and place wire on it to represent magnetic field lines. This would be done in the following week.
Length: 3 hours
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2010
Members Present: Roya, Taras, Brian, Sumaira
We decided to meet at the University of Regina library once again to compile all of our research and sections. Thankfully, all of the sections needed were done or near completion. However, we still needed to do the summaries of the sections to place on the poster, which was purchased by Sumaira. Unfortunately, Steven and Anthony were still absent.
Sumaira looked up pictures to put on the poster, and started to design the title of the poster, and Roya created the Works Cited page for the writeups. I showed the entire group the Solar Flares program, which was 75% completed by this stage (the calculators and questions were done, but the Youtube video browser was still under development). In addition, I created the Works Cited page for the links used in the creation of the program.
By the end of this meeting, we all decided that we would meet on Monday to finish the model, and we were happy with the knowledge that we had essentially finished the major parts of this project.
Length: 2.5 hours
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010
Members Present: Sumaira and Roya
Sumaira and Roya met at the University of Regina Library to complete the poster.
Length: Approx. 3 hours
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2010
Members Present: Taras, Roya, Brian, Sumaira and Anthony
The poster and model were nearing completion, so we met after school to finish both. Anthony came for about 35 – 45 minutes, though it did take some convincing to get him to come.
We were all originally supposed to meet in the canteen, but unforeseen circumstances forced us to relocate to the West Staff Room. Sumaira brought a glue gun, hair dryer and I believe silver pipe cleaner-like things for the model. She worked on the poster for most of the session. Thankfully, the content for the poster had been completed by this time, so she just had to glue the content onto the poster. Roya, Taras, Anthony and I took turns painting and drying the model. After some trial and error, we managed to create an orange-yellow texture/colour for the Sun, which looked somewhat similar to pictures of the Sun that we had obtained. By about 4:30 PM, we had finished painting and were in the process of using the pipe cleaner-like things to depict the magnetic field lines around the Sun. I had to leave at about 5 PM, but the rest of the group finished parts of the model and the poster in my absence.
Overall, it was a very productive meeting in which we wrapped up the core essential display components of our Group 4 project, bringing us to near completion. The only thing left to do was a paragraph describing the model and a couple of additional magnetic field lines on the Sun.
Length: 1 hour 45 minutes
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2010
Members Present: Sumaira and Brian
The model just needed a couple of additional magnetic field lines to be glued on. These were added to the model within this session in the West Staff Room. Thus, the Group 4 project was finally finished.
Length: 45 minutes
- Total time spent on Planning: At least 1.5 hours initially, and additional time throughout
- Total time spent on Action: At least 17 hours, though extra time was needed to create the program
- Note: Time spent on creating the program not included in action hour count, since it was done independently at home whenever I had time.
- Program can be downloaded through <link removed>. Click on Install and select “OK” for any dialog boxes that come up. It might not fit perfectly on the screen if the screen resolution is less than 900px in height. Program can be closed by going to File > Exit.
- Source code for the program is available on request.
So the logbook itself is pretty straightforward–just record your ideas and essentially what happened. If you have any problems with it, just leave a comment and I’ll try to give you some advice.
Don’t worry about it! The Group 4 project is fun and exciting, so the logbook shouldn’t be any trouble!
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I had a question about how much time your teacher gave you to complete your group 4 project?
About 4-6 weeks I think.