grid of three images: white goat eating from a tree; woman in striped top giving a presentation; and sign for joint project with WPI and Fundacion Paraguaya

Dairy goats at the Cerrito Agricultural School; Kris Wobbe presenting at the end of her Fulbright Specialist residency; and plaque outside the cheese factory at the Cerrito Agricultural School

WPI’s Model of Academically Rigorous Project-Based Education Taking Root in Paraguay

As Fulbright Specialist, Kris Wobbe shared expertise in curriculum design
September 23, 2026
By
Mia Lumsden

For decades WPI has been showing educators how to incorporate hands-on projects into coursework, knowing that when students work on real-world problems, the lessons they learn in the classroom are more likely to stick. Over the summer Kris Wobbe served as a Fulbright Specialist in Paraguay, where she was invited to help with a reverse concern: strengthening the academic rigor and classroom engagement in schools that already have a solid hands-on component. 

Through this global educational partnership, Wobbe—the director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning and interim dean of The Global School—planted a seed that her hosts hope will grow into improved academic and career outcomes for students at three high schools run by the Paraguay Development Foundation, that country’s largest nonprofit organization. 

Hands-on work is already part of the model at these schools, where students live on site and run a hotel, a farm, and other businesses as part of their coursework. Graduates leave with a technical certification with specialties in areas such as hospitality, agriculture, or forestry, as well as a standard high school diploma. Wobbe’s efforts as a Fulbright Specialist focused on strengthening the academic foundation of that diploma to help launch graduates further.

“The underlying mission of these schools is to teach the students the skills and abilities that are going to raise them out of poverty,” Wobbe says. “They see project-based learning as providing them with the skills of leadership and handling ambiguous situations and critical thinking and problem solving—while also helping to make that learning stickier.”                                                                                       

Beginning Quote Icon of beginning quote
Project-based learning [provides] them with the skills of leadership and handling ambiguous situations and critical thinking and problem solving—while also helping to make that learning stickier. Beginning Quote Icon of beginning quote
  • Kris Wobbe
  • Director of the Center for Project-Based Learning and Interim Dean of the Global School

WPI’s own data backs up Wobbe’s point: 91% of respondents to the 2021 survey of WPI alumni said that high-quality project work helped them develop a strong base of knowledge, even when the projects were in areas other than their major. 

One way that project-based learning contributes to students mastering academic content, Wobbe says, is by making concepts taught in classrooms less abstract. For example, the Cerrito Agricultural School, where she stayed during her time in Paraguay, has goats and cows. Some students are now beginning to work on a project that will explore ways to increase the milk yield from those animals. 

Not only will that project give students opportunities to practice building and testing scientific hypotheses, it will also “demonstrate the value of what they’re learning in their academic classes by having it tied to the success of the school itself,” says Wobbe, noting that the tuition-free school is self-sustaining, meaning it receives no funds from the Paraguayan government. “It matters how much milk they produce because that pays the teachers. It pays for their food. It pays for their electricity.”

That direct connection between students’ technical work and the existence of the school makes project-based learning a natural fit at Cerrito and the other two schools run by the Paraguay Development Foundation, says Martin Burt, the foundation’s director and co-founder, as well as a distinguished visiting professor of entrepreneurship and social innovation in WPI’s School of Arts and Sciences.

“We’ve shown that education can pay for itself through our practical activities. Now we want to prove that a school like ours, that serves ultra poor students, can also have gold standards in academics,” he says, adding that he wanted to incorporate WPI’s project-based learning model into the academic curriculum of the Foundation schools because of how highly “WPI is respected and trusted.”

Students, faculty, and administrators at the Cerrito Agricultural School are already familiar with the basic PBL model, thanks to the Asunción, Paraguay, Project Center, which has been hosting WPI students working on their Interactive Qualifying Projects since 2014. And for the last few years, Cerrito students have used the Experiential Robotics Platform, which WPI helped develop, in their STEM classes.

Now, thanks to the partnership established through the Fulbright program, local faculty have begun incorporating Wobbe’s recommendations to more fully integrate project-based learning into the academic curriculum at the Cerrito Agricultural School. Once WPI’s approach to blending theory and practice firmly takes root there, Burt and others from the Foundation will cultivate the concept at their two additional schools, helping the model that started in Worcester spread throughout Paraguay.

Images courtesy of Kris Wobbe and Martin Burt

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