Formative Feedback: Austin's Butterfly and the design student

June 23, 2018

Timely, targeted, and specific formative feedback is essential to students' progress and development. As a teacher, it can be challenging to highlight the importance of this to students, and to engage them in the this powerful process. In particular, peer feedback is something that students sometimes view as a make-work-project without fully empathizing with why we do it.

Recently, I've started to share the video "Austin's Butterfly" with students to help frame for them the power of formative feedback. The reactions are always surprising as students follow along adn empathize with Austin's journey. Though the age of Austin and the students in the video is much younger than that of our MYP middle school girls, it is still a powerful teaching tool to introduce the how, and in particular the why of the role fo formative feedback.

Moonrise: One of the first photos of Earth taken from the Moon and used to frame the inquiry. — *Moonrise:* One of the first photos of Earth taken from the Moon and used to frame the inquiry.

Designing Like You Give a Damn

June 23, 2018

One of the issues that we have returned to again and again in Grade 9 and Grade 10 design is sustainability. As designers, we have a responsibility to design in a sustainable manner. We are decision makers at critical stages of a product's development, and these decisions have impacts, both predicted and unforeseen.

We've been working on developing units and inquiries that provide opportunities for students to authentically investigate issues of importance. Trying to move beyond just "using sustainable materials", we are interested in empowering our students to think big and act big.

These goals were the impetus for the unit Designing Link You Give A Damn.

Students could choose to inquire into one of four areas:

Access to clean water
Mindfulness
Plastic in our ecosystem
Vaccine delivery

The way this inquiry was structured was also a departure of from typical units:

Students worked in groups during the research stage, but individually in the concept development and design stages
A website was used to deliver content and resources
Inquiry was largely student directed. At this point in their MYP design education (MYP Year 5), they should be able to apply the design cycle to solving problems with minimal support of the teacher

Overall, this unit has had the highest level of student engagement and greatest amount of autonomy. It's been wonderful to see. In discussions with students the feedback focused on the development and refinement of ideas. At this stage in their MYP design journey they had started to use the design cycle as a tool to structure their inquiry, rather than steps they had to write about.

After completing the investigation, we developed posters to present our ideas for critique and feedback.

SEYOUNG HO - Unit 3_ Individual Portfolio (1).png

SEYOUNG HO - Unit 3_ Individual Portfolio.png

Part of the feedback process involved the students meeting back together in their original group to compare and iterate their next design. This was an exciting step as they reviewed the different directions each of them had gone in and then discussed and iterated a new design based on their inquiry.

The group above came up with a particularly innovative solution for vaccine transport and storage. From left to right: A portable container to keep vaccines at a stable temperature; a large vaccine storage system that is stackable; A shoulder bag that the nurse would wear when traveling to remote areas that contains vaccines, first aid kit, as well as a used needle storage container. In discussion at the board, the group realized their ideas could work together to create a vaccine delivery system. The container would be the key element. The stackable storage would be re-engineered to store the containers for safe and easy access. The shoulder bag would be redesigned to accommodate the containers. It was a pity that this iteration activity took place on the last day of class.

As a teacher, it was great to see students engaged in these kinds of meaningful challenges. The next step is to redefine the challenges for an authentic audience where the designs can be taken even further forward to reality.

Guiding Principles: Dieter Rams' Principles for Good Design

December 9, 2017

As part of our inquiry into the role and purpose of design, grade 10s have been exploring Dieter Rams' Principles for Good Design. These have provided us with a starting point from which to evaluate, articulate, and create designs that are meaningful, useful, and focused on the needs of the user.

Through inquiring into these principles students explore their role as a student of design. Most importantly, they moved away from thinking of design as the making of attractive things, and towards the creating of meaningful solutions to authentic problems.

We began this process by generating our own list of criteria that made a design good. Then, we looked at Rams' principles and matched them to our own. Students then dove deeper, researching individual criteria, analyzing existing designs through the lens of the ten principles, and finally, creating a sketchnote showing their own understanding of the principles.

Resources and Links

Computational Thinking and the Design Cycle

July 4, 2017

The concept of Computational Thinking helped me see the teaching of coding in a completely new way. I was struggling to find a way to teach coding from an inquiry perspective, while at the same time ensuring students developed a strong foundation in basic principles. I wanted to avoid the rote teaching and practice of coding language, and instead engage at a deeper level with what coding is.

Framing the learning of coding from the perspective of computational thinking has helped me and my students really understand the essence of learning a computer code. There are several variations of computational thinking, but the one I'm following, and which is closely aligned with the IB computer science model, considers these four concepts:

Algorithms: Understanding and creating rules
Pattern recognition:
Decomposition
Abstraction

students creating shared understandings of computational thinking concepts

In the teaching of code, I've been emphasizing to students how computational thinking concepts can be applied to other areas of making. I shared the band Wintergaten's Marble Music Box, as an example of how computational thinking is employed to solve complex design problems.

Students watched the video and discussed where they saw loops, variables, patterns, and so on in the performance and the machine. They discussed how the designer might have used concepts like decomposition to create the machine.

Key to helping us understand and engage with computation thinking concepts were resources from Google and the BBC.

BBC's Bite Size site has a really engaging introductions to coding and computer science. We used this site to explore the concepts.

Google's Exploring Computational Thinking for educators does a great job of showing how CT can be applied to other areas of inquiry, and how features some great examples of lessons that apply CT to different contexts such as history, science, and geography--great examples of interdisciplinary learning.

Design:Build:Iterate BHA Wind Turbine Interdisciplinary Unit

March 23, 2017

We live on an island that is known for its wind. The annual exchange between Branksome Hall Asia and Branksome Hall Canada is centered around an inquiry into wind energy. This year’s inquiry took the BHX experience to a new level of inquiry, excitement, and challenge.

Inquiry is about investigating and exploring possibilities. It depends on a solid foundation of knowledge, and a willingness to take risks and explore possibilities. Following a visit from Professor Kim of the Wind Turbine Engineering Laboratory from Jeju National University, students began their inquiry into designing a wind turbine. With access to a variety of materials, technologies such as laser cutters, heat forming, and 3D printers, they explored the effect of blade angle, surface area, number of blades, and blade profile on their turbine’s ability to generate electricity.

For two months prior to the exchange, a team of BHA grade 9 students worked on the weekends to design and construct a wind tunnel test chamber. The centerpiece of the experience, the test chamber allowed for accurate and consistent measurement of turbine designs. Throughout the process, students collaborated with each other, used data analysis to continually iterate and improve their designs, and developed novel approaches to solving the design problem. Students innovated and experimented with materials in new and interesting ways--such as using elastic bands to tension the elements of their design, bending plastic with heat to create unique shapes, and building turbines with double sets of blades.

By applying scientific knowledge and mathematically analyzing the test data from the wind tunnel, students continually iterated and developed their turbine designs. With full access to the fabrication technology in the BHA Design Lab, we saw some students designing cross-sections of turbine blades in 3D modeling software that were later laser cut; others 3D modeled complex parts for turbine sections. One student announced that we had run out of a particular part, but not to worry because she had taken measurements and 3D modeled her own--Could we please print it on the 3D printer? It was wonderful to see students taking initiative and ownership of their learning and continually pushing their inquiry

Every aspect of this intensive project was guided by the ethos of design-test-iterate. The 2017 BHX strengthened the bonds between our two schools and provided our students with an authentic experience into what research, design, and testing entails and how to apply it to solving complex real-world problems.