Design Talking with Intermediates

Today with my Intermediate Technology class, I decided to approach the start of the designing process in a different way.
We are going to design toys and games that make you think and the first activity that we did was to look at existing products to see what you could buy at the moment. Example blog post here showing what we did. ( I am putting everything we do in the Y9 and Intermediate classes on tis sample blog so they can refer to it to keep them on track and to catch up if they need to - blog post here )

I put them into pairs today and we put a list on the board of games that they play on paper
hangman, noughts and crosses, connect the dots, pictionary and battleships.
Each team had to choose a couple of them and spend some time playing them together.
There was lots of giggling, checking for things online and shouts of "i won"!
I then asked them to have a discussion with each other and come up with ways to make the games they have just played 3D. The ideas had to be able to be played with physical pieces that you move around and not drawn on paper. they could make notes and draw as they talked.



I loved walking round and listening to them. They were so focussed with the task they were asked to do. As a graphics teacher, I LOVED the ideas being drawn, talked about, scribbled out, changed, argued over. laughed about ... They were not bothered about being fussy over their paper work, it was all about the idea and working it out. This is EXACTLY what designing is supposed to be about. Where do they start to get so fussy that every sheet of work has to be perfect? My seniors drive me crazy over this, to the point where I have to physically restrain them from tearing pages from their sketchbooks! How can I encourage my seniors to be more like these teams this morning? Totally focussed on the ideas and not overthinking everything and stressing. We can clean up drawing styles and skills later.

We then sat together round the front table and shared ideas.
I wrote these ideas up on the board and asked questions to get them to think further.

It was a very productive session doing design work as teams. 

Questions for me ....

How can I build more team work into the design process

How can I get my senior students to work like these teams today? 

If you have any ideas while reading this I would really welcome some feedback in the comments.

Team work at NCEA

After experimenting a little with some team work at Level 2 NCEA last year, I got some positive feedback from the students about it. There is some student voice about the first Level 2 standard from last year here.

As part of my inquiry this year, I want to do a lot of literacy strategies to enable the students to achieve at merit and excellence. Within this work, I want to build a lot more group work into the tasks that I set them.
This will give them ~

• confidence
• the ability to help and support each other
• the chance to talk within their teams about the task
• the chance assign roles within the group / team for themselves

When I tried this last year, I received feedback from the internal moderation process which was really good and helpful. That was to make sure that it is really obvious within the group work which part was completed by each student. This is to make sure that their submission for NCEA is clear and their own work.

I am aiming to do this in a couple of ways. When they are working on practical activities together, they will fill in the spreadsheet and indicate what they did on any given day working as the team. When they are working on shared documents online, they are going to colour code their own work in some way, either by using the highlighter feature or by the note feature.

So far it is going well.
When I asked them today what they thought about working in teams for NCEA ~

• It is different to last year
• It is different to the other NCEA classes
• We like it
• It's great

We had a great conversation today about who in the group was the watcher, the bossy one, the neat freak, the organiser, the quiet get on with it one, the loud front man ... they were all pointing at each other claiming it was others in the team.

So far so good.