A clear aim says what the team will find out or produce, within what limits, and how you will know it is done. It comes first in any project planning because roles, records and evidence all depend on it. This lesson uses an original practice project; it is not an assessed task.
How do you move from a topic to an aim?
Start with the loose topic and ask four questions in order. What exactly will we find out or make? About which group or place?
In what time or scale? How will we know we have finished?
Write one sentence that answers all four. If a teammate cannot say in their own words what the project is for, the aim is not clear yet.
Worked example
An invented team starts with the topic “food waste in our canteen”. They work through the four questions.
- What? The share of canteen food thrown away, and two explanations for it.
- Which group or place? The school canteen, not canteens in general.
- How much time? One school week.
- Finished when? We have a weekly total and a short comparison of two explanations.
Aim: “Find out what share of canteen food is thrown away in one school week and compare two explanations for it.” Each part can now be checked, planned and recorded.
A plausible mistake
A student writes the aim “Look into food waste and what can be done about it”. It sounds ambitious, but it has no group, no limit and no finish line. The team could work for a month and still not know whether they had met it.
It also hides two separate jobs: finding out how much is wasted, and judging what should be done. Split them and keep the one you can finish, or narrow the second to a question you can compare, such as “which of two explanations does the evidence support better”.
Self-check
1. Is “social media and teenagers” an aim? Say why or why not.
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No, it is a topic. It has no group limit, no thing to find out and no finish point. A possible aim is "find out how many hours a week a sample of 15 classmates say they spend on one app and compare two explanations for the pattern".2. Which of these four questions is missing from “Find out how much water our school uses”? Who or where, time period, finish point, or the thing to find out?
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The time period and the finish point are missing. A week or a month is needed, and the team should say what they will hold at the end, for example a total and a short comparison.3. A teammate changes the aim on day four. What should be written down?
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The date, the old aim, the new aim and the reason for the change, written soon after it happens.Where does this lead next?
Once the aim is clear, the next step is to share the work sensibly in allocating roles without inventing team contributions. You can see how this fits the whole topic in collaboration and project planning.
A teacher working with you can test your own draft aims against the four questions, without choosing the issue for you. That is part of our online one-to-one Global Perspectives tuition.