As part of our year 10 Humanities course we are able to research a project of our own choice, and to create an outcome to showcase at a final exhibition in term 4. We got assigned to do a project on the HASS subtopic of Geography.

Our essential question for the project is “How do dogs live around the world?”. We want to find out about dogs around the world, which breeds are most popular and what are the different jobs they can have. We chose this question as we both have an interest in animals, dogs specifically so we knew this is a topic that we’ll be able to stay focused and motivated on.

These are the capabilities we are improving and how we’ll be improving each of them:

• Effective Communication; We will improve this capability as we need to communicate well both at school and at home to complete our project to a high standard.
• Collaboration; We will need to collaborate with each other in order to split the work fairly and ensure that we’re both doing the same amount of work.
• Inquisitive; In order to conduct our research, we will need to be inquisitive to think of questions which are out of the box and will catch the attention of our audience.
• Creativity; For our project to be engaging and eye catching, we need to present our research in a way that’ll be interactive and want them to learn more.

Our core research questions for our project are:

• Where are dogs most commonly found around the world?
• Which dog breeds are most popular in each country?
• What are the jobs a dog can have and what training do they have to go through to get these jobs?
• What cultures do different countries/religions have surrounding dogs?

To answer these questions we will need to find statistics and data relating to dog population around the world and which breeds are bought in every country per year. On top of this, we also need to research what dog professions exist, the training for each role and how different countries have treated dogs in the past and present and the beliefs they have surrounding them.

The steps we have completed so far for this project are:

• Simple plan of our project
• Timeline
• Annotated bibliography of ten sources
• Week 9-10 reflections
• Progress update one
• Applying Feedback from progress update 1
• Plan out our exhibition
• Half of our weekly reflections.

Our plan for continuing our project includes:

• Applying feedback given on progress update one
• Take notes on our sources
• Compile our research
• Progress update 2
• Extensive exhibition plan
• Assembly of project elements
• And weekly reflections along the way