My first design challenge

Being a science teacher it seemed easy enough to try out what the design thinking world calls design challenges. I found a great resource with ready made challenge called http://www.thetech.org/educator-resources/design-challenge-learning. These were a great place for me to start. The challenge was how to I make sure that these challenges would connect to what I needed my students to learn.

I just started my unit on forces and motion. There is a design challenge entitled Free the Ketchup. This was perfect. It focused on Newton's first law of motion which is where I was starting. I was determined to make this the first opportunity my students had to explore design thinking. The real challenge was how long am I going to take for this challenge and how am I going to introduce this brand new way of thinking?

I started with introducing the process of design thinking with YouTube videos and a discussion on each step. I had the students take notes in their interactive notebooks about each step. I then introduced the challenge itself (see the link above entitled Free the Ketchup for what the challenge is).

At first I had the students just focus on empathy by writing questions they want to ask a kindergartner. This helped the students see and understand what empathy is. The students really struggled to understand that they were not designing a solution for themselves, but a little kid. Some of the questions were really great and would have helped them with the design, and others really needed guidance and help. I really wish I was able to connect with the elementary school on our campus and get actual kindergarten or first grade students in my classroom so the kids could interview them or even have the kids go into their classroom.

After the kids focused on the empathy stage I had them focus on the ideate or brainstorm phase. I had the students do individual sketches in their notebooks and then share them with their team. This was not as successful as I hoped. I really need to come up with a better way for the students to ideate. It is the most important step there is in the process and the students seemed to just breeze through it. There was not as much creativity as I would have liked.

After the students complete the ideate phase (1 day) I have them start their prototypes. I provided common materials like string, Popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, foam, cardboard, rulers, and even some duck tape. The issue with these challenges is that they can get expensive as a teacher. I really tried to have the students find materials they had at home or would throw away to help them prototype. Many did not bring in supplies for this challenge but watched teams that did be more successful. I gave them three days to build their prototype.

After the prototypes were complete I had them present their design. The students were give a rubric (see this link for the rubric) that I used to grade them. Overall for their first challenge they did pretty well. Many groups did not go far enough into how their design used the concept of Newton's first law. This is where I really need to work with the students to help them understand the importance of explaining the science AND HOW they used it. Hopefully on the next challenge they realize that their presentation is in place of a test and they really need to explain the how they applied the concepts and what they are.

Video of complete challenge: