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Teaching Strategies
Using design tasks in your classroom involves employing
teaching strategies that may be quite new to you. The
following are some approaches that may be of help and
interest to you:
- Introducing
Tasks MIT
design professor Woodie Flowers tells how he frames
the starting point of most design work. See how a
tech ed and science teacher use design briefs to do
this.
- Class
Demos Compare
initial demonstrations that one tech ed and two science
teachers used to introduce the Model Parachute task.
- Variables
& Fair Tests
Compare three teachers who each conduct a critical,
early discussion of key parachute design variables
and read about the notion of "fair testing".
- Coaching
Teams View
strategies for helping design groups as they build
and test their products.
- Time
Management
Help students budget their time better & make
designing go more smoothly.
- Design
Diaries
LBD's series of single-page worksheets help students
keep a record of different design activities.
- Supporting
Creativity in Kids
Hear Harvard's David Perkins talk about how creativity
is not for the elite few, and ways Richard Kimbell
and Woodie Flowers support students in being more
creative.
- "Seeing"
Designer Roles
Metacognition involves thinking about how you think
or do something. Watch one teacher's experiments with
helping her kids be more self-reflective.
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Conceptual Design
The fastest-to-finish design tasks are ones where students propose products
but don't build them. In this page's movie, UK's David Barlex describes how conceptual design activities
are central to encouraging students to be creative in the Nuffield's Young Foresights curriculum.
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Whiteboarding
Georgia Tech's Janet Kolodner talks about this technique
used in Learning By Design that was drawn from the
Problem-Based Learning model.
- Drawings
& Sketching Drawings help designers
see and judge ideas without having to build them.
- Safety
Safety
in the classroom and in product design are both key
issues that need to be discussed.
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