As we only had an hour, I decided to focus on teaching the stages empathising and ideating. We designed for a friend. The kids could pick from a selection of different "friends" who wanted things like "something to sit on", "something that moves", "something that is soft" and so on.
At the empathising stage, Master T, made the link between empathy and design thinking by sharing with the class...
"Empathy is thinking about what someone else wants!"
At the ideating stage, I was impressed with how Master R, caught on to the idea of changing one thing about a previous idea to make it better. He began with a simple idea, and kept making changes to make it better and better and better!
As we ran out of time...here are the crew that spent their lunchtime bringing their ideas to life by prototyping using Lego! They have requested more lunchtime making and creating sessions... Master S even suggested making things out of old boxes and cardboard from home. Sounds like a Makerspace to me!
I am always intrigued by the way "making" creates language in abundance. As the kids created with Lego we chatted (back and forth, back and forth) about topics ranging from how the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Moon orbits the Earth all the way to how an escalator works.
The next step in my design thinking journey is to explore the way S.T.E.M learning tasks (like building the highest tower, bridges, egg drops, hover crafts, scribble bots to name a few) could be tackled in the classroom with a design thinking structure.
.
Let's see how S.T.E.M and design thinking go in year 5/6 tomorrow. I think we shall focus our learning around towers of the world, to tie in with their classroom inquiry topic, tourism!
No comments:
Post a Comment