Design Thinking Curriculum Pilot! Yikes.

In Which Erica Gets Very Nervous and 100 Young Designers Get Over-Excited.

Hello,

I had promised myself that I would blog at least once a fortnight, but as I have no idea if you guys read this or not, it becomes a bit challenging to make it a priority! No MATTER! Exciting work continues to spurt forth from TLP's little Ship St hub.

This week - Design Thinking - so you may have read earlier about Kiran and Riverside School. Well, I have been beavering away in the light of this inspiration and have come up with a pilot curriculum teaching Design Thinking Skills to Year 7's and enabling them to apply these to the design of chocolate bars, new machines, social deprivation solutions and much more.

I am always a bit nervous when it comes to the pilot of a new programme - I know, and teach, that one can only learn through mistakes and through trial and error, but nevertheless, the feeling of being exposed and vulnerable as a practitioner can be quite challenging. I so want to give my client organisation the highest quality learning resources, materials, plans, experiences and find it hard to accept that this only comes through the iterative process. Luckily BACA, the partner Academy I am working with on this project, understand this much better than I do and their fabulous teachers have done a GREAT job at helping me and the students adjust to this process!

Last week we ran our first workshop with the whole year group, taking them through the key concepts for design thinking:

FEEL - what is the problem like? How do people feel about it? How can you find out more?
IMAGINE - explore how life could be different, how the design could be improved, come up with ideas
DO - try it out in prototype, explore different ways of doing it
SHARE- celebrate and share your ideas with others.

This week the staff team took the students through the first part of the process - research methods. The kids did a great job of choosing an advert from a magazine and thinking about what research would have been done to produce that product. We looked at different methods of researching and how you could use social media to find out more about what people thought. We also started to develop a scrapbook on the design process, so the students will be able to document and reflect on their journey from research to concept and outcome.

Three things teachers might find useful when introducing research:

1. Investigate how much students know about what research is and what it could be used for. Make sure you contextualise this in their areas of expertise - what research might you do on your favourite football team? If you were designing a new game to sell at Christmas, to find out more about your family history?

2. Use visual cues - all around us are products that are "designed". Invite them to tell the story of how a particular product or tool came into existence.

3. Documentation - in Riverside I saw how very useful it was for students to embed their learning by documenting the process- its sort of like science experiment write up meets storytelling meets journal. Using a scrapbook, or a wall in the classroom helps them to embrace the journey of their work toward a goal or an output and makes fascinating viewing for a school visitor.

Next week is analysis ....I will keep you posted!