A bicycle is an engineering marvel!

This week saw three important pieces of our fall work overlapping and developing together.

Bookshelves:

During one of our extended blocks, our learners worked closely with our building and engineering consultant Ross to start setting up their metal and wood for the bookshelves they’re designing. This mini engineering exploration is designed to give them the opportunity to work on scale drawings, design, feedback and iteration, and most importantly metalworking skills that they will need in order to do the larger project in transportation. The week before, they had moved their ideas from paper sketches to one quarter scale prototypes made out of foamcore, wood towels, and other appropriate materials. Now was their chance to learn how to work with the tools that allow metalwork to happen: reciprocal saws, grinders, welders, sanders to name a few. We unpackaged the new tools, and the students created guide sheets on the safety and proper operation of the tools that they shared and then posted in class.By the end of next week, all of their pieces should be cut and ready to be assembled into their design.
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Motion/kinematics:

In order to develop the proper terminology in transportation, we are working towards better understanding motion, and the mathematics of linear and nonlinear relations (for example, when that object changes its speed, what are the mathematical models that govern that kind of behavior?). We’ve already developed baseline terminology and understanding of motion through looking at constant velocity, and this week we added a new motion to understand, what happens when an object changes its velocity? Students conducted an experiment on an inclined plane, and are collecting data to build mathematical models but they can use to create predictive models for motion that is much more complex. It was exciting to see some students already derive their mathematical models, and one group did a predictive analysis of how far their car would’ve gone if it continued in its motion for 60 seconds – it showed a wonderful connection between the models they were creating and the real world result of them. Terminology like friction, acceleration and terminal velocity came up in our conversations which is exactly where this experience was designed to lead us towards. Of course, this will lend itself to quadratic’s which are a key component of our Algebra 2 curriculum.

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Transportation/bicycles:

The biggest event of the week was our first trip to KVIBE ( Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange). We spent over three hours at their Kalihi facility with students getting a broad overview of the community outreach work that KVIBE does, and then we dove into the mechanics of bicycles under the excellent tutelage of Marcos, Galen, and Lorenzo. We did some work with naming of parts, but the key experience for students was understanding how the wheel (hub, spokes, rim) works and to take apart and reassemble the wheel hub – cleaning bearings in understanding the ways that it is put together to create a nearly frictionless rotational center for the wheel. In the process of explaining the mechanics of the bicycle, a large number of significant physics terminology came into our language – tension, torque, peer pressure, friction, statics… As they were explaining their work, Lorenzo commented with great emphasis “the bicycle is truly a marvel of engineering!”. Students worked with their teams, and were both collaborative and diligent in tackling the task of disassembling and reassembling wheels to better understand how they work, and the physics concepts underlying them.

All in all, it was rewarding to see our students tying together these three strands looking towards the broader goal of designing and sharing ideas about their learning with the community. Students have already talked about sharing their knowledge with other schools about how to repair bicycles, putting up instructional webpages about the values (health, environment, social connection) and giving examples of how to live a more sustainable lifestyle. It was an exciting week!

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*** All of our photos for the year are kept on our Flickr page here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskiFvesE

Good Design, Good Projects

Good Design, Good Projects

I spent some time this weekend re-reading Dr David’s Merrill article “Pebble-in-the-Pond Model for Instructional Design” (http://www.ispi.org/archives/resources/Vol41_07_41.pdf). I count myself lucky to have been able to take a class from Dr. Merrill and consider him one of the great minds in instructional design. In the day-to-day lives of teachers, there is rarely the opportunity to do a complete instructional design process that is advocated by instructional designers, but the ideas he lays out in this wonderful summary are the same basic structures that we use when designing good projects.

One of my favorite parts of the article is the diagram that he uses to lay out the foundations of good whole problem design:

Phases of Effective Instruction

Phases of Effective Instruction

Dr. Merrill advocates for designers to first start with the whole problem – to both engage and immerse the learners in the “why we need to know”. In much the same way, when we design good projects, we need to back up and ask what’s the essential/driving question that will direct our focus, direct our learning explorations, and give us a reason for wanting to do this work. The next step is to “identify a progression of such problems of increasing difficulty or complexity such that if learners are able to do all of the whole tasks thus identified, they would have mastered the knowledge and skill to be taught.” In other words, we need to identify the scaffolded activities that will allow the learner to build the requisite knowledge and skills to understand how to solve the whole problem. Once we know that, we can provide activities and feedback to learners so they correctly learn and apply the skills and content knowledge they need in order to work towards the whole problem.

In our work in Mid-Pacific eXploratory (MPX) and the ways that we work with other teachers through Kupu Hou Academy (kupuhouacademy.com) our work mirrors much of that found in this good instructional design methodology and there is much to be continually learned in order to apply the best design of deeper learning practices around these essential “first principles of instruction”.

One of the things that this can lead to is moving away from teaching knowledge and skills as discrete items that we might use, and instead become necessary components that one must know in order to work on the whole problem. This year in our 10th grade class, we’ve been talking about ways that we can make a difference in the prevailing issue for this generation – climate change. In the areas of transportation and energy, there are things that we can do to have an impact. We started the year with visits to sustainable buildings and Hawaiian Electric, and are breaking down this big task into components that we need to understand in order to be knowledgeable and capable enough to propose possible solutions. That means understanding motion,energy and electricity, as well as understanding the mathematics of modeling and analysis. Those are the component skills that we are developing in order to propose and create solutions to help make a difference in the big issue of our generation. By anchoring our activities in the “need to know” we create a more powerful learning experience that will stay with learners far beyond the life of this course.

All models are wrong but some are useful

Rumination from MPX10 from the week of Aug 31
On the Values and challenge of models

As we explore and set our projects and experiences around the big theme of climate change this year in our 10th grade exploratory classes, I am continually designing into our experiences the important framework of modeling. It is no surprise to me that the latest versions of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Math framework in the common core (here) emphasize heavily the importance of the generation, exploration and elaboration of modeling, and more particularly mathematical modeling. When we ask learners to work with models, we push them to deepen, extend and anchor their understanding of relationships between variables: position and time, force and acceleration, parts per million of carbon and global average temperature, really any defined system of interest. 

In our class this week we have been working on the mathematics of linear expressions and the physics of Constant motion (broader target: developing the language and understanding an engineer needs for looking at transportation). As a means to deepen our understanding of the modeling of constant motion (broadly leaning of the work of the modeling pedagogy of ASU) we generated experimental data (position and time) of the motion of 2 battery powered cars that move at different speeds. From that data the students use a modeling tool (in our case the wonderful *free* Graphical Analysis App from vernier software http://www.vernier.com/products/software/ga-app/) to create a mathematical model for each car.

position time graphs for the two battery powered cars

position time graphs for the two battery powered cars


The culminating activity was a predictive model session. The students were given a scenario (the red car starts 7 seconds ahead of the green car) and needed to use their models and data to try and predict when the faster green car would catch the red car. The first pass at this activity generated a LOT of conversation, questions and difficulty for the students as they moved from superficial understanding to deeper meaning making.

Students brainstorming in teams

Students brainstorming in teams

This kind of learning in our class provides so many layers of learning. It challenges students to truly show they understand the models they have created. It gets to the heart of experimental  science in designing experiments that generate meaningful and reliable data. It requires students to be active – to analyze, explain, predict and defend their work. Importantly it starts to replace naive thinking of the real world with internally constructed models that real scientists use to observe and understand phenomena. Oh – and it is fun!
In the process of planning for our modeling I found a great quote from statistician George E. P. Box  “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.  In order to appreciate the power of this statement my goal is to nurture a real awareness and appreciation for modeling as well as its limitations. 

Putting together the puzzle

For Laura, my co-teacher, and I, we are working towards better laying the foundation for why we need to look at alternatives to lifestyle choices we take for granted in the context of climate change, and the even greater issue around sustainable lifestyles. Since much of our work will focus around energy and transportation, we thought a trip to the power plant at Waiau would give us an opportunity to have the students start grappling with energy and sustainable living. The students did preliminary readings and outdoor walks to look at the ways that electrical energy is both made and brought to our homes, schools and businesses. The trip then served as an opportunity to see both the marvelous engineering that goes into building something on that scale, as well as the inherent challenges given the way the world is heading. Some pictures from that trip here:

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when we came back, we ask them in teams to generate responses to a three, two, one bridge thinking routine – three thoughts, two questions, one analogy. This gave them a chance to both reflect and broaden their thinking about their experience today. More to come…

A counting we will go…

A counting we will go!

The school year has started off, and we are already a week into class. I spent some time trying to think of a kickoff activity that would both give students a chance to collaborate, problem solve, do some mathematical thinking, and do it in the context of an interesting problem. I ended up settling on the idea that there are more stars in the universe then there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. The students started off by looking at this short video from Hubble of a slice of the Andromeda galaxy:

Then we launched into the activity – they were put into teams of three, given a 1 L jar of sand, and asked to come up with a method, measurements, and calculation to give their best estimate of how many grains of sand were in the jar. Some of the pictures from that activity here:

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Surprisingly (or maybe not much so) even though there were a wide range of methodolgies put into place, most student groups came up with a fairly consistent number in the range of one to one and a half million grains of sand. Of course, if we extrapolate that to how many stars are in our galaxy, it would take something on the order of 200,000 L of sand to approximate the number of stars in our galaxy. This is about the size of a small swimming pool. The final kicker is that there are as many galaxies as there are stars in our galaxy. So, you would need a swimming pool full of sand for each grain of sand in the swimming pool – certainly seems to be more sand than you could put on all the beaches of Earth.

All in all, the activity went well, and students were both challenged to think and explain about their mathematical calculations, as well as a deeper sense of appreciation of everything from the size of the galaxy, to the importance of scientific notation and exponentials.

We Have to Stop Pretending

In response to Scott McLeod’s Challenge to answer “When it comes to education, what are 5 things that we have to stop pretending?”

When it comes to education, we have to stop pretending…
– real learning cannot be fun and purposeful
– students only learn when an adult controls the experience
– it is impossible to integrate subject areas meaningfully
– time for faculty collaboration should be the last priority
– 21st Century (Deeper learning) competencies should be taught outside of specific content standards

#makeschooldifferent

Keep it Real – Reflections on Learning so Deep that it hurts…but in a good way

On the plane heading back from #deeperlearning 2015, ruminating on that experience, thinking about the Book “Show your work” by Austin Kleon (thanks Ramsay Barnes) and looking back over the last couple of weeks of my students’ work.

A few thoughts on the Deeper Learning 2015 experience. (This was my third year going so I was one of the few “threequel” attendees). So many good things here, but maybe the focal point could be Rob Riordan’s (High Tech High’s “emperor of rigor”) reminder to us of Rob’s Rules of Rigor:
There is no rigor without –
• engagement
• ownership
• exemplars
• audiences
• purpose
• dreams
• FUN!

The conference experience typified this, with a powerful, engaging keynote on Day 1 from Chris Emdin (@chrisemdin) who delivered a thoughtful, energetic and passionate exploration of “Reality Pedagogy”. He pushed us to stay true to ourselves and our motivations that brought us to education and made a passionate case for meeting our students where they are at – as bright, motivated learners. A few quotes from his talk:

“The Masters Tools will never destroy the Master’s House”

“Ground Zero for Changing the world is teachers…dig deep and dig out!”

“You just can’t wake up and deem yourself culturally relevant.”

“If you say that education is the civil rights issue of our time, then you better teach it in a civil rights manner in your classroom!”

Wednesday Night we watched a film “Most likely to succeed” which looked at the education system historically and made the case the school transformation in deeper learning practices is the best way to prepare students for their future. It both looked wide at cognitive science and the facts around educational succeed, but also followed a few students at High Tech High through school year, documenting their challenges and successes in a real Deeper learning experience. MUST. SEE.

Thursday I ran a 4 1/2 hour deep dive based on our year long project investigating sustainable transportation through understand, designing and building electric bikes (a little more about that work below). I had 12 eager, talented and diverse colleagues (teachers and students!) and we spent the day exploring riding and designing around the bike experience. Their artifact presentation at the end of the day was exciting because it showed the diverse ways they approached deepening their understanding of this work. I am still collecting pictures of the day, but I am posting them here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk9Uk3JT. The webpage that holds the resources the dive are here: https://sites.google.com/a/hightechhigh.org/dl2015materials/deep-dives

The real power of this meeting of the minds was just that – meeting, laughing, talking, sharing with like minded passionate practitioners with deliberate intent to understand and support our work together.

The work over the past couple of weeks in my classes points towards these rules of rigor. In MPX two projects are reaching their conclusion: the Math and Art project has been in the holding phase as I have been working toward getting permission to exhibit the student work on the exterior walls of the Hartley complex. Back when we designed this three building complex, we had planned to place provocative, fun engaging art and exhibits through it, but these items were cut from the budget and never brought back. It has been in my planning for years to get exhibits posted into this space and this project is the perfect place to start. The students created art, created math models of their art and elaborated on their learning – three examples below:

Kendall"s Math and Art Poster

mahina's math and art poster

Brianne's Math and Art poster

At the same time, most of our bike groups now have operational electric bikes! This project which took two months longer than planned (hey, who said doing real work was easy or fit neatly into a box?) had students explore everything from torque and rotational mechanics, to forces and motion, to electricity and magnetism, to air pressure, to climate change. The ultimate goal will be an auction in May with the proceeds going to a charitable cause that supports our work. The class flickr site https://flic.kr/s/aHsk1yMvRc has photos through the whole process, but here are three slides from my presentation at Deeper learning that show different stages in development. They don’t show all the formative assessments and knowledge construction that were necessary to accomplish this project, but you can certainly see the active role of the students in their work and learning:

moving from idea to construction

moving from idea to construction

learning to repair bicycles

learning to repair bicycles

looking at circuit design

looking at circuit design

Last example of “Keep it Real” is the work from our Innovative Design Technology Class. Our latest project challenged the students to propose, design, develop and complete a project of their choosing. Students projects included
researching, designing and building an athletic shoe,
3-d scanning and 3-d printing a mounted owl for curation and designing as mascot gifts
programming and wiring a raspberry Pi and stepped motors to make a camera shoot rig.
storyboarding and designing a mobile app that would gamify trash collection to increase involvement in cleaning up the community.
Some slides on that below, but what was clear was that students more than not dove in deeply and generated something of value through their interests and passions.

koa's canvas design on motion and  dance

gian's show making process

gian's shoe finished

Erika's design sketches

Erika's Hiking Bag design

These projects and the resulting student learning are not perfect, but when I look at Rob’s Rules of Rigor, I see many of the elements he defines in this work and that encourages me to “Keep it Real”

Mastery learning and the role of formative and summative assessment (aka: Wait….What? How much do you charge for that?)

I was having a conversation with my fifth grade colleagues yesterday as they are preparing for their students to present their capstone projects. I have been working with a couple of boys as a mentor for their work in understanding atomic structure – both what happens with the electrons around atoms, as well as what’s going on at the nuclear level – their work is amazingly deep and meaningful. But I digress…

In thinking about what the final assessment for their capstone presentation should look like, we got into some deep conversation about their final presentations, how those could be assessed to judge learning, and the importance of the learning path that occurred and the artifacts that the students are collecting as they move towards this final assessment. One of the challenges we were conversing about was the importance of formative feedback, and the opportunity that these pieces allow for feedback and reflection as well as the final presentation which provides an opportunity for feedback as well.

As we were talking, it reminded me of the story from good friend Dr. Phil Bossert at the HAIS office. He was at a resort on the Big Island and during a special event, a well-known local artist created a landscape painting while chatting with guests over the course of an hour or so. At the end of the conversation, the painting was done and was really beautiful. When the guests asked how much he would charge for the art, he responded $6000. Some people were surprised and asked how he could charge that much if it had only taken him an hour to create it. He responded by explaining that had not taken him an hour to paint it, it had taken him a lifetime of honing his skills so that he could create it the way that they had seen.

In much the same way, we often look at final presentations of learning as the only evidence of what has occurred, often forgetting the amount of enormous effort that goes into drafting, research, feedback loops, trial and error and the myriad of other ways our learning takes us before we get to the final exhibition. These presentations are often high-stakes affairs in that a 10 to 20 minute presentation can be worth a considerable amount of student’s grade. As teachers, we have sat with and talked with the learners as they have walked through the whole process, and in my opinion, if we have done our job right we have assessed and expected students to maintain clear and meaningful artifacts along the journey so that the story of their knowledge building is more fully told. Let me give you an example:

One of the projects that my students have worked on has been to create artwork under the guidance of the visual arts teacher. They have researched a particular style – Cubism and after creating their art were challenged to re-create it using mathematical functions in a online mathematical modeling software called Desmos. We are just at the culmination of this work where the students are going to create a art opening that showcases their artwork, their mathematical representations, and a written narrative that explores this range of knowledge building. One example of this work is from Justin:

Justin's Math and Art Work - look at the functional representations he has used to create this!

Justin’s Math and Art Work – look at the functional representations he has used to create this!

We had a visitor from Greenwich High School in Connecticut, Brian Walach and Justin showed him this work. He was pretty impressed with what he saw, and inquired how much time Justin had put into a mathematical functions that represented his art. Justin replied that he’d spent over 80 hours – most of it of his own volition tweaking and massaging functions to make them work to produce a close replica of his lines and curves. When Brian asked him if he had been required to spend that much time, Justin explained that he had been driven to want to get it right – and had been willing to put in the time to took to understand the mathematics, and then create the final product. In much the same way that a driven artist or craftsman will work ceaselessly to hone their skill so that their work is their best representation of their abilities, when we’re designing great projects, we provide opportunities for students to dive in deeply and experience the pleasure, passion and yes, pain of working until it is right. As the adult who has been given the opportunity and challenge to assess learning, it is important to consider both the path and the product if we are to best determine the learning that has happened. Sometimes, the end product is just the tip of the iceberg and we do a disservice without thinking about the path the student has taken to get there. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the research that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in many fields. There is some debate about if this is an absolute requirement, but I think we can all agree that it takes dedicated time for anyone to become a true master craftsman in any field.

If we can create situations in our classrooms where students spend this time because they feel it is their urgent need, and less that they will be punished if they don’t, I know we would engender a more fully engaged, responsible and healthy learner.

Paint and Learn by Numbers (Flowers are Red, Young Man)

A car trip to the airport with my older “Hanai” son Jim today led to my ruminating about the joy, struggle, and emerging clarity about trying to design and implement real-world learning for mathematics and science in my MPX 10 classroom. In trying to explain the difference between traditional pedagogy and constructivist, learner centered environments, I was trying to come up with a metaphor for why so many students think they’re not mathematicians, when conversing with them makes it clear that they are clearly mathematical thinkers, but they don’t fit into traditional mathematical (or science for that matter) classrooms. As I was trying to come up with a way to differentiate this struggle I am having, it occurred to me that one analogy/metaphor that worked for me (your mileage may vary) was the difference between painting by numbers, and creating art.

Imagine a classroom where the goal of the classroom was to fill out increasingly more difficult paint by number drawings, each one very prescriptive in both how to do it, and what the outcome should look like. Cognitively, the student requires very little effort to accomplish the task, and at the and they have a piece of art that more than not looks like the learning target that was intended. The assessment wouldn’t be the quality of thinking that went into the artwork, but more a case of how well they match filling in the shapes neatly inaccurately according to the schematic in the plan. An example might look something like this:

FRS-Paint-By-Numbers_1

(from http://www.davidkhurst.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/FRS-Paint-By-Numbers_1.jpg)

Think about a classroom that would use this as a means to teach kids about art – everyone would be clear about what they were “learning”, assessment would be a process of conformity – no allowed color changes or going outside the lines and if you don’t cause trouble, you have to do very little real thinking. You might think yourself “why can’t I create these instead of do someone else’s”, but that’s not the goal of the class, is it? And ultimately, if you were to ask a student to paint an elephant or even more heretical she paints something of their own idea, they would not really know how to even begin to take into account color, shading, perspective, foreground and background, or any of the other things that are part of an artist’s repertoire of thinking, habits of mind, and tools. If a student were to become an artist, it would likely be in spite of their experience, not because of it.

I am struck by the sense that much of what we do in math and science education has a fairly direct corollary. The work we do in math and science classrooms, at least the ones that I attended when I was in school, and that I still still think are fairly prevalent in most students’ experiences is a paint by number approach. The unit of instruction starts with more than not a particular kind of problem or learning target (we are going to learn Newton’s Laws, we are going to learn how to find the slope of the line) and then the approach is a very linear sequential already mapped out method to get to the intended answer – the giraffe. This would be fine if the goal was to teach kids how to do math or science by numbers, but I’d venture to guess that it does little to create a sense of being a mathematician or scientist, and does not engender a sense of action, engagement, or application of any of the ideas, because they are not connected to anything but the painting with the numbers itself.
In our science department meeting in thinking about how we are going to implement next-generation science standards (NGSS) one of the ideas we agreed on was the importance to move from science facts – memorization and shallow learning to having students involved in more of the process of learning and bringing engineering into the work so they understand how what they’re learning can be applied. One of my colleagues mentioned that research shows that as students move from elementary to middle and high they begin to move away from their curiosity and the number of questions they can generate about phenomena and instead start to just become task oriented around lower-level work. Ken Robinson tells this wonderfully in his books “Out of Our Minds” and “The Element”. If our classrooms are paint by number classrooms, it’s hard to imagine that we would create any other condition than this.

If we want to create artists, we can’t do paint by number, we need to have students develop the eye, the mindset, the language and the work of real artists. In much the same way, in our math and science classrooms, we need to re-think and purpose our energies around creating classrooms in which we don’t give students work sheets or repetitive problem sets, which are the equivalent of paint by numbers, but instead design and challenge our students to investigate, create, reflect, collaborate and implement artifacts that show the work of a mathematician or scientist. If our classrooms already have a fixed outcome and there is no energy, creativity and even mystery around what we might end up with in the process of exploring our field of study, then we are doing no better than paint by numbers.

All of this thinking made me remember a marvelous song by Harry Chapin that I’ve known for over 30 years, but just came back into my thinking while I was ruminating about this issue in my classroom and everyone’s learning environment.
If you’re not familiar with it, I hope you find it is relevant, sad and insistent about re-thinking our classroom environments as he intended it to make us consider over 40 years ago.

Frameworks, models and structuring learning

It’s been a few weeks since the last post, – not an indication of little happening, but more a case of a flood of activity that’s been hard to sit down and organize and share.
Certainly the photo streams that I post on Flickr have been updated regularly:

For the design class here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/121697751@N02/sets/72157646692621755/
For the MPX stem class here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/121697751@N02/sets/72157646271766017/

It’s late on a Friday already, but it’s worth sending out a few ideas about what we’ve been working on – things have been exciting and reaching some interesting points in our work.

One of the things that is clear is that in both of the classes that I’ve been working with, the need for structure around the things we’re learning is clear and fits well within our understanding of how we learn science around us – if we can develop effective, simple and applicable models of the way things behave, then it makes them easier to apply an understanding novel situations.

STEM

The big activity we have been working towards has been building electric bikes – not a ready-made kit with easy to attach parts, but the nitty-gritty and get your fingernails dirty kind of building that involves identifying parts that put together would allow a cheap, effective and creative way to provide urban transportation. In order to get to this, a fundamental understanding of electricity and magnetism are necessary so that when we are connecting these industrial grade parts we have an appreciation of things like voltage, current limits, parallel and series and their role, why wires have different gauges… Etc.

In order to set the foundational knowledge for this, we needed to have a good working model for understanding electricity. Back in my modeling experiences from the 1990s, I was introduced to CASTLE (Capacitor-Aided System for Teaching and Learning Electricity) approach to learning electricity which was developed by Melvin Steinberg of Smith College and uses a compressible fluid approach to understanding how charge flows in circuits ( a brief description of the curriculum and its rationale here:http://www.pasco.com/prodCatalog/EM/EM-8624_castle-kit/ ). I really believe in this kind of structured but constructivist approach to building an understanding of circuits, charge flow, and a functional understanding of what’s going on with electrical devices, so we’ve been using this to build our foundational knowledge as we have been unpacking our kits.

This week we reach the culminating point where the students started hooking up the parts of their electric bike kit and needed to learn everything from the correct schematics to hook it up, to stripping wire and crimping connectors to make things fit together correctly – a lot of this was new to me working with the scale of items and it was both exciting and challenging to make sure the students were able to work on these ideas. By the end of class today, Friday, two of the five groups had connected the parts together and successfully got their motors working through the controller and the throttle – success! There are more pictures of the Flickr site, but here’s a few pictures below. Next week, we get to the really challenging work – how to put these parts on a bicycle so that it is powered and can be used to transport students across our campus.

Students working with their electric motor kits

Students working with their electric motor kits

click here for a movie of a groups working motor

Another group grapples with putting together their components

Another group grapples with putting together their components

All students were required to create a schematic diagram that showed the correct connections between the components for their electric bike

All students were required to create a schematic diagram that showed the correct connections between the components for their electric bike

Defense of understanding of circuits and charge

Defense of understanding of circuits and charge

Students defending their understanding of the circuits and charge flow

Students defending their understanding of the circuits and charge flow

Innovative Design Technology

We finished the first large project and shared designs a few weeks ago, and so we wanted to give the students a few smaller challenges to give a little more variety to the design work that they have been developing. As a result, we chose a roundtable activity where we let them determine categories where design might be interesting and applicable to address real-world problems. Eight different teams ended up choosing problems with either steering wheel redesign for cars, or looking at recycling as a opportunity to think about how design could improve people’s behaviors in the process. I have attached a couple of the slide presentations in PDF format, and one of the challenges continues to be to make sure that there is good science rigor underneath the work that they are doing – in the case of their work in this round, students investigated thermodynamics, heat transfer of different materials, ergonomics as they looked out the ways in position that people hold wheels, the different kinds of plastics that exist and the ways they are recycled, and how temperature can be measured by a variety of means.

As we use our design thinking to approach problems, it becomes a really useful framework for learners to consider both what they know, how to identify a problem that needs to be solved, and a process to get to the end. We have actually looked at a couple of different models for design process – including this week how the Wright brothers attacked building the first airplane, and how engineers approach building design. The design framework becomes a means to look at problems, to think about what we know it but we don’t know, and how to quickly generate possible solutions and test them. Some pictures below as well as the presentations from this last round of work:

PDF Presentation sam audreen erika

Steering Wheel Keynote_Koa, Marshall, Sam

Prototype creation

Prototype creation

Scaling ideasFrom computer-generated models to working size

Scaling ideasFrom computer-generated models to working size

Construction with cardboard for the prototypes

Construction with cardboard for the prototypes

Opening slide from another group talking about their chair process

Opening slide from another group talking about their chair process

Students defend their chair design to the class

Students defend their chair design to the class

So much to talk about, and so I’ll try to blog more frequently over the next few weeks as we reach some culminating points in our work…