You really get in to your research. You connect with the family member and start to uncover a really cool angle on the topic. Those family members also point you in the direction of books and websites that will help you with some background work. Your proposal is starting to look amazing, except for one thing: you still don't know how you will present it. But then it hits you. This is a personal story. You can focus on the family connections and tell their story and you can do that even more effectively with images and sound as you can with words. You toss some ideas around with your teacher, family members and classmates and come up with a plan. Your teacher loves your proposal and encourages you to move ahead. The one caution he gives you is that this could turn into a mammoth project, and you need to make sure that you keep it focused enough that you can actually complete it in time.
You get to work and quickly realize that your teacher was right! You make sure that you keep coming back to your research question and, no matter how interesting, if you find yourself on a tangent, you break away and get back to the main focus. The projest and the research seem to be proceeding in parallel. You bounce back and forth between the two with questions on one side prompting something on the other. You spend
This is the kind of engagement that we would hope for in any research project. When a student makes a meaningful connection with a topic that nothing else really matters but the research, they are getting in far deeper than most. In this particular case, it is a family connection, but sometimes the connection comes from experiences, interests or passions elsewhere in a students life.
The presentaion mode came out of the story here. In many cases, it is OK to let the decision of how the making will occur to wait and be driven by the story that needs to be told. This may result in limited options for the making, if it takes a while for the story to emerge, but the connection between the research and the final product may well be worth it. We have seen enough projects where the product seems to stand independent of the research that working to establish a strong connection between the two is worth the occasional due date extension.