Process for G4 Project

[Midnight23]

Hey guys,

I know there's a lot of threads on this topic, but rather than topics, I'm more interested in asking for help in the process of going through the G4 project. This is the first year of IB in my school, and it seems like the teachers have less of an idea than I do about how to go about it. I guess I'm asking for something along the lines of: where to start? what should the end product be? can the project be done as a group? does it have to involve all the sciences equally? Your help is appreciated

[Emmi]

1. Your teachers should have given you a general area (something like "water," "the environment," etc). For the project, what you want to do is think of a smaller experiment within the context of the broader area. For example, in my year our big theme was "Frozen" and we did an experiment to calculate the freezing points of several different kinds of liquids and the effects of adding different types of solute to them.

2. The end project is usually a report or a poster. My school had us do a poster that was pretty much a lab report: it had an introduction/conclusion, our procedure, our results, a hypothesis, pictures of what happened during the experiment, a materials list, references, etc.

3. The project must be done as a group, hence the name "group 4" Just hope to get a decent group (all of my group members were good except for one, who didn't show up to the experiment and his part, the conclusion, was sent at 1am the night before it was due, and being the person putting the poster together, I wasn't too happy about that).

4. It doesn't necessarily have to involve ALL the sciences equally. My school doesn't do IB physics, so we didn't have to include physics in our project. We just had to do biology and chemistry. I think our chemistry portion outweighed our biology one, but as long as you have both represented in some way or another, you should be ok.

The group 4 project really isn't too big of a deal, and IB isn't going to check it and give you a score. It's more of something your teachers are required to assign and they mark off whether you've adequately completed it or not as part of your science grade. If you take two sciences (biology and chemistry, chemistry and physics, etc) you only have to do the project once, and it will count for both classes.

[Midnight23]

My teachers so far haven't come forward with any topic which we have to do it on, they are asking us to come up with the topic, and I had the idea of doing something around a particular pond near our school, our teachers also encourage the same, is it okay to make a powerpoint or prezi as the final report?

[Sandwich]

Yeah don't worry, it's not every school that gives you a theme. All our different groups had to come up with our own as well and mine had zero inspiration so just did 'fruit' - it was hard to find a physics bit for that, but we did friction of a banana skin or something random like that and it went down ok. Basically you can make up anything you like so long as you can get something out of it for all three sciences or however many sciences are represented in your group. As Emmi said, it doesn't have to be equal - mostly people will do the science they take (unless they do 2) so it usually works out as proportions being the same as the number of group members in difference sciences.

You should speak to your teachers about how they want the final projects presented: ours wanted a poster, but yours may want a powerpoint type presentation or not mind so it's up to them. It's not really a serious aspect of the IB, it's more of a tick box exercise so the quality doesn't have to be high - basically you just have to represent the sciences, work in a group and produce something not too shambolic at the end!