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Day 7: Design a Toy

Goldman felt that the Parachute task had for students low authenticity: "When would kids ever make a parachute themselves?" Ed followed Parachute with a Transfer Task where students design a toy that uses a parachute in its design. Another transfer activity, MapleCopter, developed by Michal Lomask and others at the Conn. Dept of Ed, has students explore factors that affect the motion of falling maple seeds, and build models to simulate their spinning flight.

MOVIE 1 Questions:
1. How does Ed structure sharing ideas during brainstorming? How else could it have been done?
2. Notice what Goldman says to students who were weak on when they wrote about their designing. What formative assessment tasks could have been
used earlier to monitor these skills?
3. Review the 7 Models of the Design Process in the "What Is Design?" section. Which model seems to fit best Ed's review of designing?

MOVIE 1:   6 minutes 44 seconds MOVIE 2:  1 minutes 11 seconds

MOVIE 2 Questions:
1. Was the day after finishing the parachute task the best time to brainstorm toy ideas? What ideas would you expect had it been done while students were learning about model parachutes?
2. What different kinds of thinking do students do when designing a toy that they did not do when designing the chute?
3. What other transfer tasks could test students' experiment designing skills?

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