Many of us will have fond memories of children’s TV engaging us to turn our used bottles into rockets, our wooden spoons into cartoon character puppets, and attaching googly eyes to anything which keeps still for more than 3 seconds! Schools are great at turning recycling into creativity, and design is at the heart of this. Later, the skills pupils learn turning pasta into planes and tins into trains fuel are the beginning of making the engineers and artisans of the future.
In this #UKEdChat discussion, we will discuss designing, making, breaking and fixing as a way to spark the ideas for innovation.
Questions
- In what way does ‘design’ come into your subject area and lessons?
- Do you think enough focus is placed upon the design process when creating things in school?
- In your opinion, what are the essential design skills which we should teach our pupils?
- What are the biggest challenges when guiding pupils through a design process?
- How can we best teach the importance of revising designs for improved iterations?
- How do/would you get pupils excited about the design process?
- What
is your favourite ‘junk to gems’ activities and project/s? - What design processes do teachers themselves do to support learning?
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Leaders in Pacific Asia are realising that what worked in the last 50 years is not what will be required in the next 50. They have come to the conclusion that their economies need to become more innovative and their schools more creative. It is one thing for an education system to produce well-educated deferential citizens; another to produce a generation of innovators.
Michael Barber, The Guardian, Wednesday 22 August 2012 19.00 BST
So . . after 6 years, are your students doing more than they’re told to do, having grand ideas and implementing them? Or are they just deferential?