You spend a few days surfing the web, browsing through books and watching videos to get a greater sense of the topic. the more that you explore, the more ceratin aspects of the topic start to appeal to you. During this process, your teacher spends some time showing you examples of previous students' projects in class. He connects the topic of each piece of research to the medium of the project itself. You start to see that certain projects communicate a message better because the message is matched to the medium and you think about ways that you can do the same.
You continually write in your Inquiry Journal and as you reflect on what others have done and what you ar researching, potential ways of making something to effectively communicate your learning start to surface. You jot down some ideas with initial thoughts on how you might go about making them. You pick your top two and go and talk to your teacher. He is encouraging and gives you some ideas as to what you might think about as you proceed. Based on that conversation, you choose your product and start getting the design, tools and materials together, at least on paper. As you do this, you continue to gather information around your topic.
You eventually get to a point where you are thinking that you've got a story to tell and you know how you are going to tell it. You start to create your final product. As things come together, you recognize that there are still gaps in your research that you have to fill, but you are in pretty good shape. You also find that you spend more time learning skills for actually making your project than you thought that you would. Even though you've made something like this before, you are regularly jumping online to find YouTube videos about specific construction skills and design concepts so that you end up with the project that you envisioned, not the one that you settled with because you didn't have the skills to do what you originally wanted.
This project takes much more time than you thought and you are thankful that you jumped on it right away, but the due date arrives and you are reasonably satisfied that you have completed it to the bext of your ability. You put it in front of your class and present your research. The class is interested in what you have created have many questions to ask. You find yourself able to confidently answer most of them and geniunely curious about those that you can't. Maybe your work here isn't done. Maybe there's a bit more research to do and you are looking forward to spending a little more time on the topic on your own!
This was a smart move. Often, figuring out the story you need to tell needs to come before figuring out how you will tell the story. Provided there is enough time for this exploration, allowing the student to explore the broader topic before identifying the focus and then exploring ways of communicating the results of the research will allow the time for meaningful connections and intelligent decisions to be made. The time that is often needed and overlooked is the time needed to learn the skills to make what it is that the student needs to make. Thankfully there are an increasing number of DYI sites such as Instructables, a myriad of YouTube channels and even Pinterest that will give students ideas and instructions on how to make any number of things, but the fact is that they need the time to learn these skills. We don't build this in to essay production time, because we teach students to write essays in school and do that over the course of many years. Making something new doesn't have the pre-scaffolded time involved and it needs to be built in to the unit.