This page features project-based learning resources with libraries of ready-to-use projects for your classroom. While the focus is on finding mathematics-specific projects, many of these sources also offer ideas for other content areas. Each accompanying description is designed to help you quickly identify which resources best fit your needs.
Design & Pitch Challenges are a free set of 18 entrepreneurial challenges designed by NC State researchers to engage students in authentic mathematics learning. They span mathematics topics across middle school and high school, positioning students as entrepreneurs who design a product or business that can help to solve problems in the world and their local communities. The website includes enough resources that a teacher could run it without any supplementary resources, but many teachers also like to use some of their daily lessons alongside the project to support their students mathematical learning journey. The website also provides a teacher resources hub that includes a teacher guide, a set of ready-to-use slide decks for each challenge, and various tips documents about implementation and community engagement.
The High Tech High Project gallery is a free and extensive list of projects that have been implemented at various High Tech High schools. The High Tech High model is well known for its hands-on project-based learning approach, now spanning all grades k-12. In the gallery, you can search from a drop down menu of discipline-specific keywords. The set of mathematics projects is multiple pages long! When you click on a project, you will find images of the students’ experience during the project implementation and a description of the different products that students had to create over the course of the project. It is a lot like reading the story of a project. It is very ideas-based, so you will need to create your own resources to support your students, such as rubrics or daily lesson plans, but you can get some amazing project ideas from this website!
Defined Learning hosts an extensive set of career-based projects for all disciplines, including every k-12 mathematics course. They are designed to provide students with the opportunity to engage with the disciplinary work that is done within real-world careers and provide teachers with rubrics associated with final products that students create as part of the project. They are intended to be the overarching project idea that connects disciplinary content like mathematics to real-world experiences, and thus the curriculum relies on teachers to connect their daily lesson plans to these project ideas. This website is not free, but a great investment for a school wanting to implement PBL.
PBLWorks, formerly Buck Institute, is a leading project-based learning resource. PBLWorks is best known for their intensive workshops (you do have to pay for these) that teach how to use project-based learning in the classroom, but their website also provides example projects for free and many other PBL tips for best practices when implementing projects. They provide project ideas for all content, and the list of ideas is searchable by clicking the content area and age range that you are interested in. This website does not have any project-specific support resources like rubrics or daily lesson plans, but PBLWorks is in the process of working with teachers and researchers to build out a few mathematics projects with all of these supports for full implementation that will be available for a fee.
Citizen Math (formerly Mathalicious) is a resource recommended to me by multiple PBL math teachers who participated in my dissertation study. While they position their resources as supplemental lessons based in the real-world, many of the ideas are worthy of being project ideas. As you can see in the photos, some of the lessons are freely available and you can access both the idea and the full student and teacher handouts while some only provide the idea for free and require payment for the handouts. I have not had the opportunity to use it myself, but I look forward to exploring it more in the upcoming year!
If you know of any mathematics projects aligned with project-based learning, please email them to me at margaretleakborden@gmail.com. I’d love to learn about more great resources beyond the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter!
Authenticimatics 