PBL is a pedagogical approach that has been used in traditional schools. Many aspects of PBL are designed for a common classroom environment. Educative, on the other hand, is an online learning platform teaching exclusively Computer Science and Information Technology courses.

Guidelines for creating projects

It is advised that an author creating the projects should keep some fundamental concepts of PBL in mind, even though it is clear that not all the principles of PBL will be applicable here. Still, the following are the steps that can help you create a project on Educative’s platform.

Find real-life problem

The first step is to find a problem in real life that you have solved or think you can solve using the tools you have a command on. In our context, the scope of problems is limited to information technology problems. After selecting the problem, you should generally develop its solution to be presented to the user during the project. We provide complete solutions to all of our projects. While choosing a problem, you should think about the following factors:

Resource limitation

The first thing you should ask yourself is whether the problem is solvable in Educative’s framework? There is a limitation on computing resources. Currently, we are allowing 7.5 GB of memory with 2 CPU cores over the cloud. Anything that is solvable within these resources is a good pick. Secondly, Educative promotes CLI-based access to external resources. GUI-based access to external access should not be included in a project. Any resource that is exclusively useable outside of Educative’s platform cannot be used, for example, Google collab or AWS Sagemaker.

Project length

The complexity of the project should be adequate. It should not be so long and complex that a student becomes bored or an average learner just cannot solve it within one hour. You should keep in mind that the workspace widget that is extensively used in the projects will retain its state for a maximum of 60 minutes.

Also, the project should not be so easy that it is not challenging enough for a learner. It should not be so short that you cannot divide it into more than 2 or 3 steps. If its length is too short, then you should probably consider writing an Educative answer for it.

Licensing issues

You should be very careful while using the code written by other authors in your solution. Any project that uses proprietary code or proprietary software is not a good fit for Educative’s framework. Also, any dataset that is used within a project should be freely and publically available with no restrictions on commercial usage (this website is a good source to find such datasets).

Task division

The next step is to divide up the project into a manageable number of tasks and isolate the part of the developed solution for each task. In each task, you’ll instruct and guide the learner to complete an aspect of the project and provide hints and solutions. In the next lessons, you can see how much space you will have when describing a task, along with the format. You should divide the solution into small enough steps that the description fits appropriately in that space.

Tasks arrangement

Once you have divided the solution into tasks, you have to arrange them such that a learner does not need to go back and forth to implement a module. The steps should be ordered in a way that is intuitive.

To improve pedagogy, it’s advised to follow the same order while devising the tasks that you yourself followed while developing the solution. This way, the learner will not only learn to solve the problem but also learn the proper order in which professionals would solve it. It’s recommended to go through task divisions of various projects available on Educative’s platform for inspiration.

Write the title and description

You should choose a title and description of the project. This is the most important part of your project. Here is your chance to advertise your project for a new learner. The description should be short, succinct, and catchy. Try to highlight the importance of the technologies you are demonstrating in your project. Try to establish the importance of the solution you are developing and the possible outcomes if the learner learns that technique.

But the description cannot be an essay. It should not have more than 400 words. Feel free to make use of diagrams and statistics related to the project and the technologies used in it. Also, in some cases, it’d be a good idea to include a screenshot of the final outcome of the project.

Relevant courses and similar projects

To help enrich the learner’s experience, you should select three courses on Educative’s platform that’d either serve as good prerequisites or good follow-up reading after taking this project and include them with this project as relevant courses. Also, find projects that are similar to your projects in some way, and include them in the list of “similar projects”.

Guided projects

You will be creating guided projects that have a hint and solution mentioned in each step. We motivate the learner to solve the problem on their own, but if they cannot, then we provide the solution in a single step. Solving each step should solve the complete problem.