Design Thinking Meets Cooking Shows

So not only do I love design thinking I also LOVE cooking shows.  After attending ISTE 2014 and participating in an Iron Chef competition, I decided to take my favorite cooking show into the classroom.  I created a teaching strategy called Cutthroat Classroom.  In this strategy I grouped my students into small groups. Those groups then were given a meal to "cook". The first one that I tried today was with ASB/Leadership and it was to cook up the perfect Winter Formal.

To help with the theme of cooking I created a pantry of ingredients (mason jars filled with slips of paper that had things they can use in the challenge).  For this challenge one size of jars had a budget, another set had a location for the dance, and the third jar had different dance elements that ASB owned already they could use (like lights, decorations, etc). Each team was able to get one of each type of jars. Then we went into sabotages and auction! This was new to some students but they caught on really quick. I auctioned off sabotages like cutting teams budgets in half, cutting teams time in half, and loosing one of their pantry ingredients.

From there the students started "cooking".  This is where the real magic has started. We went on Thanksgiving break and the students were all anxious to work together over break on their meal plans.  The students knew what I was looking for in the project and pitch in order to gain a 4 on our rubric scale. I am excited to see what they come up with and to have the winning "meal" put into place as our dance.

So how does this connect with design thinking? Well not only is part of the rubric grade based on them explaining how they used the design thinking process, but I already heard them using elements and the vocabulary of design thinking in the first five minutes.

The best thing I have heard in the past three years of teaching in Vista is when a students yelled across our Pavillion "Mrs. Painter, this was the best day ever in ASB! I hope all classes do this!"

Here is a link to the website template I created... and here is a link to the website for the challenge described above.