10th Grade — Passion Project: Design Something You Actually Want

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

If nobody assigned you a project for the rest of the week, what would you actually choose to make?

🎯 Today's Big Question

What happens when the brief is entirely your own choice?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Choose and scope a self-directed design project based on genuine personal interest.
Plan and produce the project using any combination of skills learned this year.
Justify the project's scope as realistic for the time available.

🧰 What You'll Need

Any tools/software used so far this year
Careers in Design hub, for inspiration

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Choose & Scope

Do Now (5 min, above).
Pitch (20 min): each student proposes a project idea and scope to the teacher for a quick feasibility check.
Plan (15 min).

Day 2: Produce

Independent production work (40 min).

Day 3: Produce

Independent production work (40 min).

Day 4: Produce & Push Further

Independent production work (40 min), pushing past a first draft.

Day 5: Finish

Finish and prepare to share (30 min).
Quick share-out (10 min).

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

📚 Key Words

Self-Directed: A project where you choose the brief, not just the execution.
Scope: How big or small a project is -- realistic scoping means finishing something real instead of starting something huge.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Project assessed against the student's own stated scope: did they finish what they realistically set out to make?

Exit Ticket: Now that it's done, would you scope this project the same way again, or differently?

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

How you submit today's work depends on what kind of work it was. Physical/paper work (most of this semester so far): photograph it with a classroom camera, upload the photo from its SD card onto a computer, and save it into your portfolio -- that upload is your submission, and the physical piece itself is yours to keep, the same as in Grade 9 (your notebook is the one thing with a home base in the room, and even that's your call to bring home when you want it). Digital work (once you're producing files in Photoshop, second semester on): no camera needed -- instead, EXPORT the file. Export your finished project as a JPG, as a PNG, AND save a copy as a PSD (all three), then upload all three into your portfolio. Either way: the portfolio upload, with a description, is what actually counts as turning the assignment in for credit.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week, add your best finished or in-progress piece to your portfolio (the Google Drive folder you started in Grade 9, becoming your Google Sites portfolio in Lesson 10) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, what tool/skill it used, and one thing you learned. Keep it current -- don't save it all for the portfolio-website lesson.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Passion Project: Design Something You Actually Want.” This project asked: “What happens when the brief is entirely your own choice?” I used Self-Directed by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry · Domain 2: Project Setup and Interface

🔗 Want to Learn More?

No extra links for this lesson.

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same self-directed inquiry a Science fair project demands — you choose the question, then answer it for real.

Career Connection: This is literally practicing the freelance/personal-project muscle every career on the hub eventually needs.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Turn your passion project into a real listing (an online shop mockup, a magazine pitch) as if selling or publishing it for real. Start here: decide which format actually fits your project (a shop listing for a physical item, a pitch for an illustration or article) before building anything, since the mockup's layout depends entirely on that choice.
Document the whole process as a case study for your portfolio. Start here: go back through your files and screenshots from earlier stages of the project right now and save copies, since a case study needs in-progress images you can't recreate after the fact.