Great article on the benefits of project based learning. It made me smile as I remembered a project I did with my middle school students. Their task was to build a solar cooker / oven using ideas learned from science lessons. To find out if their ovens / cookers work we (students and I) decided to see if we can bake chocolate muffins in their solar project. What fun. On baking day the excitement was palpable in the class room. Some ovens / cookers were not successful, but the kids devoured their half-baked muffins anyway.