You start assembling what you need to build this epic monument to your superior making prowess. You've got the tools and most of the materials. You draw up some plans and figure out exactly how it's going to look in fine detail. You wonder how your research topic is going to connect with this, but you don't worry too much. You're that good and will be able to make any topic work with this.
You jump on to Wikiedia and a couple of "study" sites to get a general idea of what is going on. You get the broad sweep of the topic and come up with a research question that seems to fit the project. You bookmark a few more websites and build a quick bibliography and submit your proposal. The teacher wonders a bit about the shallow nature of your many of your citations in your bibliography and suggests that you might want to look for some material that digs a little deeper into your topic but is intruiged with how you propose to present your research. You are given a somewhat tentative go ahead.
Now that you've finished with the hoop-jumping, you can dive into bulding the 8th wonder of the world. You spend hours on your project, carefully trying to weave elements of your topic into it wherever you can. The process is really about doing web seraches any time that you feel like it's time to add something "topical." Cleary not your best research but, everyone will be in such a state of awe, they won't notice.
Presentation day arrives and you're not really feeling 100% finished. You ask to present next class and the teacher grants you that little "extension" given that there is no way that everyone will share on the first day anyway. You are ready for the second class of presentations and your classmates are blown away by what you've created. You talk about what you've built with occasional references to the topic of the research. Things get a little scary when your teacher and classmates start asking questions, but you think that you dodge that bullet. Overall, you're pretty pleased with it all. Great looking project with enough content to appease the teacher. It's all smoke and mirrors! Let's hope the mark warrants all the work you put into it.
This is not an uncommon scenario. When the product becomes the focus of the assignment, the inquiry or research can take a back seat. As discovered by this student, the focus on the project can also take a huge amount of time. The level of engagement is impressive, but it ended up on the wrong aspect of the assignment. It can happen that the engagement in the making can spill over into the research portion of the assignment, but this isn't necessarily going to be the case. Continued dialogue with the students through the course of the research and making is needed. The assessment piece should also talk about how well the end-product communicates the depth of the research achieved by the student.