AP Government CBL -- Student Solutions: A Demo

This is the 5th post in a series on my Challenge Based Learning Project with AP American Government. As you recall, the five student groups were challenged to "create an authentic medium for promoting our democracy."

The last post investigated the Gov Love Ning which was fully operational. Here we will take a peek at a web site I consider more in line with my expectations for this project. Unlike the ning group, operation ivote created a web site that had not already received lots of traffic. It was more or less a demo. Operation iVote built a web site for promoting demcracy.

Strengths
As this group noted in its assessment, the "project dealt less with voter mobilization and more with an actual change in voting process." The group decided to promote online voting, putting together a site which demonstrated how online voting would work. In fact, the sample ballot was one of the strongest features of this attractive site. Also included were an online petitions and a template for contacting one's representative. The group considered their presentation to the class to be their "launch" and made a tremendous impression. The Q&A was very exciting. The class had lots of questions and this particular group had logical and well researched responses for each one.

Weaknesses
This group embraced the cbl with terrific enthusiasm, but was very quick to jump to a solution. I'm not sure they did their best job trouble-shooting security issues. In addition, some of their online features-- such as a twitter site with one tweet-- seem to have been included somewhat gratuitously.

Conclusion
It was interesting to see a group take the project in a completely different direction from the others. The Operation iVote group delivered an exciting presentation which launched a viable web site for promoting online voting. They were the first group to present and set the bar high for the others with their terrific preparation.

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Screen Capture from Operation iVote web site.