High school students often struggle narrowing and defining their research topics. A common topic looks something like “To what extent do short videos affect teenage health?”. That’s an incredibly difficult topic to research, in large part because we haven’t defined “health.” Are we talking obesity? Blood pressure? Kidney stones? The possibilities are endless.
Helping our students narrow their research means we need to make them understand the importance of defining terms and give them strategies to do so. This is where Matchbox and Hot Wheels toy cars come in handy.
The activity is simple. Put the students in groups of four or five and give each group two toy cars. As s group they need to decide which car is better and define the characteristics they used for that judgement. The point of the exercise is to get them thinking about the different ways we see things. Is a car good because it’s fast or because it has more storage room? Are Maseratis better than Toyotas because the Maserati is head-turningly flashy? Or is the Toyota better because it’s affordable?
If they can see how to differentiate characteristics of toy cars, they’ll be one step closer to differentiating the characteristics of their topic. Eventually, they’ll narrow it down to one aspect to study.
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