Recently at Smoky Hill, students and teachers may have noticed the small groups of students going around to classes with QR codes in hand.

Government classes, such as Chris Tocco’s and Brian Lee’s, gave their students an assignment that required help from their own peers. The classes were tasked to create a survey, based on a hypothesis having to do with politics, and create questions for their survey. They would then go out, class to class, asking for people to take their surveys, needing at most a hundred responses.

“The point of the project is to let students experience some similarities to what it is like for political pollsters to go around [and to] poll other people,” Tocco said. “And the other end of it is to learn what their peers are thinking, to learn about political socialization and political knowledge, to find out where their peers get their information and what their peers and the Smoky Hill community think about various issues,”

Students would go to various teacher’s classes assigned to them. “Teachers were given the option of inviting the students in or not,” Kelly Muhr, a science teacher who had agreed to have students come in, said. “I think it’s a really good opportunity to get those massive data points that they need,” 

Students conducting these polls make comments on how it went during a class discussion after the fact. “Freshman were rude,” Valentina Sandoval (10), whose group focused on weighted classes and liberal ideologies, said. Some explained their stories of interacting with all different kinds of classes. “They would just say no even though they had their phone in hand,” Valentina said. 

Overall, the hope was for students to come out with new experiences from having to rely on their peers to complete a assignment. Walking from class to class, having to do something many students may have not experienced in many other classes, was aimed at creating a new learning experience for the students.