Project Pros and Cons for

The Global Grocery List Plus Project

Created by Jill McCue

Last Updated: July 23, 2002

The Global Grocery List Plus

Pros

1. The students learned and practiced averaging skills.
2. The students had to learn ratios and cross multiplication to figure price per pound.
3. The students used higher level thinking skills to hypothesize about the different locations and their prices. I was amazed at their “economic” understanding and the reasons they gave for their hypothesis.
4. The students learned about their own communities and others.
5. The students developed a better economic sense about the areas where they live and vacation.
6. The students used email and attachments for correspondence.
7. The students practiced data entry.
8. The students learned the importance of correct data and careful typing.
9. The students used research skills, on the Internet, in the library and in their villages to obtain information about their home and out of state communities.
10. The students used map-reading skills when researching the out of state communities.
11. The students practiced copying and pasting in pictures to their web pages.
12. The students produced web pages. This was a first for 4 out of 5 of them.
13. The students learned to graph information in Excel and to paste a graph into a document.
14. My youngest student learned the basics of line graphs and what they represent.
15. The students felt the excitement of seeing their work online.
16. The students were enthusiastic about joining other online projects, instead of doing our normal “summer school” work.
17. I experienced my students’ enthusiasm when learning/doing something differently.
18. I provided 2 more sets of data to the 2002 prices for others to use.
19. I discovered through correspondence with the developer and use of the existing site features like an edit feature that I would use when setting up an online project.
20. I understand the educational value of a large pool of online participants. My students had few choices for out of state locations because of the loss of 2002 data.
21. I continue to develop new spin-offs that I can use with my classes in the fall involving different currencies, food weight and measurements, and community research.
22. I am amazed at my students’ thinking and economic skills!

Cons

1. Data submitted to the site is accepted regardless of correctness, and it does not appear to be edited.

2. Participants submitted email addresses, yet email addresses of submissions were not available to assist in research about their communities.

3. The project developer was not open to the idea of adding additional comparisons.
4. The site had experienced a database crash recently so all 2002 entries were lost.
5. There was not much useful data to compare to in 2002.
6. There is no edit or back feature availability for the price submission form so many submissions are errors and cannot be removed by the submitter.
7. The submission form for lesson strategies is not currently working. I will submit as soon as it is working.
8. In order to view prices, one has to select each item to be shown. A select all feature would be useful.
9. The Lesson Strategies are also unedited and several submissions are incorrect or inappropriate for this area.
10. The latitude/longitude finder feature did not work.
11. We were unable to find per capita income of our communities. Our villages only had household income figures. This is a piece of information that we could not share with the site.