What did you enjoy the Most in Genius Hour

“Genius hour is a time to explore and experiment with potential ideas. I discovered with genius hour that some of ideas started out huge and complicated and able to break it down into a simple and easier idea.”  

A great definition from a student of what genius hour is to students.  What did students enjoy most about genius Hour?  This is a summary of their responses.

18 students replied the thing they enjoyed the most about Genius Hour was being able to learn and do their own thing.  One student put it appropriately when he commented the following:

“The freedom to choose whatever I wanted. If I was given a project that I did not want to work on, I would not have done as good of a job, or worked as hard on it. Because Android Development was something that I wanted to do, I was truly interested in finding solutions to problems.”

The 2^nd most common thing mentioned by students was that they enjoyed working with their friends and discussing their learning with friends.

But there were a number of other comments that I found interesting, comments that showed incite into why Genius Hour is great for students.  Here they are below, in the exact words of the students:

• I enjoyed being able to learn and create something that including more than one of my interests. I love computers and working with them but this also gave me a chance to include my skill with music and being able to create something I can call my own.
• Finding resources on a certain information that is needed.
• I enjoyed the learning aspect of this Genius Hour because it was a great learning opportunity for me. It allowed me to pick a project which I wanted to do, rather than being told what to do (Freedom of choice on what you want to learn). Choosing what you want to do ensures that you can work at your own pace to suit your learning. From this Genius Hour, I gained experience of what I can expect in the future in University; learning on your own.
• Working on the video, and getting out of class to take picture, and going around the school taking photos. Overall I did enjoy the time that we were given for Genius Hour.
• Finding out what was wrong and then trying to fix it.
• I liked the change of scenery genius hour brought to the regular in class work. It allowed us to take a break from our everyday activities which ended up being a good experience.
• the fact that I could get marks for trying out something new, something I chose and enjoyed doing :)
• In my opinion on it is that it was boring but not soo boring that i didnt want to do it , i still wanted to learn so i did the work not because i had to because i wanted to
• I enjoyed working on writing articles making me feel like a hockey analysis
• That we got to learn by ourselves and whatever problem that we ran into, we had to figure our way out by ourselves.
• How we had the option to pursue our own goals and ideas during class to promote learning on our own time, which I found inspiring.
• What I enjoyed most about genius hour was we could learn and do something that we wanted to do. Also that we could work with partners. That made it so much more enjoyable.

In summary I would like to quote a student once more.  The student’s comment made all the effort

worth it, from setting up this section of my Information Technology Course, to the “Celebration of Learning” we had from 7:00 – 8:30 where students presented and showed their work, to all the reading and feedback of their blog entries.  Here is a moment to remember in my career:

“I created something I never would have imagined and never thought about. I had never expected that I could do this. It never crossed my mind that I could be able to create something just from scratch to then branching it out and expanding it to create something that could be useful for certain people to use in the future if it was really useful. I got my idea after a few days of thinking hard and getting opinions from people which then created my genius hour project. Thanks to genius hour I never would have thought about this and created it. But if I were to do genius hour again I would have decided to do it on something else, but since this was a quick idea that came to my head I didn't get to expand much on it. But then again I had no idea what I was going to do until I got opinions from others.”