Design briefs
This was a fun, engaging task. I enjoyed observing the way different people in our class responded to the challenge - some cheated, some came up with great concepts.
Greg showed us how in technology, old design briefs were based upon:
Greg showed us how in technology, old design briefs were based upon:
Investigate design produce evaluate (IDPE)
This has now been revised with VELS, to become Investigate/Design, Produce, Analyse/Evaluate (IDPAE), shifting the importance to getting the process right, with analyse / evaluate being present at each process stage. This adaptation of the brief has created more scope for developing higher order thinking skills.
The task was:
Make a frog jump.
Make a frog jump.
Resources: Carboard, frog, rubberband, stickytape, scissors
To do this task well, students would need hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, cooperation skills.
I think that when running this, or any, task in a classroom, it is important to make sure that students describe the process of their design brief. The task would be fun and engaging without this process of describing, but in order to develop higher order thinking skills, students should be able to discuss the means they used to get to the end. This translates into any subject area: For example it's no use getting a correct answer in maths if you have no idea of how to justify your answer - how can you be sure the answer is correct?
To do this task well, students would need hand eye coordination, fine motor skills, cooperation skills.
I think that when running this, or any, task in a classroom, it is important to make sure that students describe the process of their design brief. The task would be fun and engaging without this process of describing, but in order to develop higher order thinking skills, students should be able to discuss the means they used to get to the end. This translates into any subject area: For example it's no use getting a correct answer in maths if you have no idea of how to justify your answer - how can you be sure the answer is correct?
My partner and I chose to photograph our process on a mobile phone, and post it to our blogs. We also took a short film of the frog jumping, but enabling the video to be imbedded to the blog proved harder than we anticipated. Pairing design briefs with multimedia such as this would be a good way to encourage students to break down the steps they took, and describe each one. The design brief could be filmed in stop motion format, with students recording a soundtrack which analyses and evaluates each step of the process.
There are many design briefs out there which require readily available resources. http://www.enchantedlearning.com has some good ones. Or why not come up with your own?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.