A week of construction and reflection

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Mark Hines

Well, here we are eight weeks into the semester. What are we up to these days? And for that matter, what’s on my mind about our work?

Let’s start with interacting with text for meaning. We often in education asked students to read text to acquire new terms and concepts, to expose students to different opinions and to consider different perspectives and approaches. This week in the design class the students were reading some different articles on the importance of ergonomics as they go through the process of designing, prototyping and testing their chair designs.
As I was looking through their notes, there was a wide gap between some students and others. As I was thinking about the role that these notes played, I realized I was having the students take the notes to deepen their understanding of the field, but I wasn’t really having them interact with their own thinking enough. Below are a couple of pictures of work I considered exemplary because they show students not just taking down ideas, but organizing, reflecting and sketching to try and deepen their meaning.

Matt’s Sketches on good ergonomics

notice Samantha’s interaction with her own text

some of samantha’s notes

notice how matt organizes through color and offsetting text

There are certainly many ways to go from this initial data mining activity to more meaning. I realized I wasn’t doing enough to have them consider their own work, so I asked them to go back through their notes and highlight three important concepts and two areas where they felt that they didn’t really understand the ideas fully and annotate those in a way so that we could talk about what they learned and what they still have questions about. I also debated whether having them do a think pair share activity would be helpful so they could talk about that – I plan to have them do that when they come back together with me next class period. All of this is tied to working towards creating a more reflective process in their learning. Their blogs are another element in doing this.

As a part of the design class we have been working on re-designing the student chair experience. They have created designs in sketch up make:

They have been working on printing these in our 3-D printers, which added another layer of technology to this project. The last step is to create a full scale prototype out of cardboard. I realize that most of them have not made a full model out of cardboard before so to get them warmed up, we had them research ways to work with cardboard and then pick a small-scale project to build from the following website: http://www.ikatbag.com/2011/03/how-to-work-with-cardboard.html

Today they showcased their constructions which took about an hour and a half of class time:

mini top hat

hinged gift box

sabers and swords

top hat design – love the aesthetics

mini top hat

dragon boat

alien space ship (the inside was detailed as well)

top hat with examples of ways to adhere edges

so for them, the next step now is to build the chair out of cardboard – more to come on that activity…

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The 10th grade MPX students have still been exploring issues around transportation, but we’ve also been trying to understanding the kinematic equations of motion which are part of our physics content as well as a deeper conversation about motion in transportation. One of these sidebar projects I’ve had them working on is building a catapult by first converting the design into orthographic representations, building a one quarter scale model out of chopsticks with the ultimate goal of building the catapults, which we will start tomorrow. There’s many layers to this particular activity – working with the mathematics of scaling, attention to detail around design and construction, understanding how we move from concept to design to construction and central to the core content, the physics of projectiles… The pictures below show the scale models that the students completed which took a couple of hours of class time between creating the schematics which I showed in my last blog, and the final products you see below:

careful measurements

finishing touches

attention to detail

competed 1/4 catapult scale models

construction of scale models

Hopefully by the next time I create a blog post, we’ll see examples of their final product work. Tomorrow we pull out the power tools and let them have at the full construction! Speaking of which, our ninth graders just started working on their first construction which is building tables that they will be using to do their full scale aquaponics constructions on during the course of the year:

engineering: from design to construction

mpx 9 construction team

working in our make-shift lanai shop

When we say we believe in constructivism, we really get our hands dirty!

Knowledge, Understanding and Application

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Mark Hines

The work over the last two weeks in our exploratory class has been really focused on three pieces that I am working to weave together for our students. In the common core standards for mathematics there is an emphasis on three domains of learning: procedural knowledge (I will refer to as knowing) application and understanding. In a sense, the work that we are trying to do in both mathematics and science is to build not just the knowledge of things like definitions or how to solve problems, but putting them into real-world context so that we can use this knowledge to solve problems, and to apply that information to novel situations.

So how does this play out over the last two weeks? In our mathematics work, we have been looking at solving algebraic expressions which is a foundational skill that will allow the mathematical models that we are developing on our science side to be more fully understood and accessible so we can solve for a wide range of problems. As a school, we are working with Dr. Milfreid Olson from the University of Hawaii Curriculum research development group (CRDG) to help us reflect, strengthen and deepen our approaches in mathematical work throughout campus.
In our class, that has meant doing some traditional math practice work with the equations and eventually inequalities as well as moving on to more complex functions like quadratic equations which will help us better express and understand motion that is both linear and constant as well as changing and accelerated.

As an example, we just did a investigation on Wednesday that had students rolling a golf ball down an inclined plane to try and better understand its motion through the mathematical model generated by looking at its position as a function of time. I’ve included an example of graphs and mathematical models that the students generated as a part of that study below.

investigating motion of golf ball

golf ball rolling in action

analyzing video capture of motion

Cami explains the math model in numeric, graphical and motion map forms

What is notable here to me is in order to get to the kind of representation you see, it requires students to do all three phases: knowledge, application and understanding. We can deepen this more in the post investigation that will occur on Friday as we look at different inclines, try to use these models as predictive representations of the real world and try to come to a more complete understanding of what the unit analysis and the mathematical function tell us about the motion.

The ultimate goal is to make this real world applicable and we are in the midst of learning about the mechanics of bicycles as a part of our year-long investigation in transportation. This week we spent our double block on Tuesday taking apart cleaning up and reassembling the different bearing systems that allow a bicycle to translate force into motion by reducing friction.

using torque to take apart the crank shaft

using torque to take apart the crack shaft

taking apart the bottom bracket to expose the bearings

galen explains the roll of bearings

All of these activities lend themselves to rich meaningful conversations around terms like friction, torque, force, procession, rotational mechanics, mechanical advantage, simple machines and much more. We will be using part of our time on Friday to unpack some of the terminology and physical understanding that was easily evidenced by their work on the bicycles.

There isn’t always a perfect fit between the work we are doing with our math, science and technology (STEM) but as much as we can, we are trying to draw meaning between these investigations so that we are weaving together these strands into a more tightly integrated and understood unit about our investigations of the physical world.

On the design process, iteration and feedback

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Mark Hines

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been working on a design challenge on improving student chairs (brief posted last blog).

Learners have looked into empathy by interviewing and observing MPI students in chairs across campus.

From that they have defined the problem more clearly. They have identified a set of design problems to address: hardness of seats, movable writing surface, greater mobility, flexible back rests…just a small sampling…

This past week was spent on the ideation phase – coming up with ideas on the design. The learners first started sketching ideas in their book, then took those ideas and scaled them up for a feedback loop with other members of the class – you can see pictures of this below. This kind of activity really serves two critical functions. First, it provides an opportunity for learners to assess their own thinking about what a quality drawing should have, and what strengths and improvements they can recommend to someone else. It also gives the receiver of this information opportunity to embrace feedback that is both supportive and helpful so that they can improve their own work. This kind of structured class activity builds agency in learners as they learn to see each other as a means to improve their work, and therefore increases the importance of conversation and critical thinking in our class. The next step will involve them editing these drawings to include the feedback and to reflect on the importance of this kind of formative strengthening of their work.

Some of Kris’s ideas on share design in his sketchbook

Some of Samantha’s quick sketches of chair ideas

Feedback loop in progress

Students getting feedback

The learners also researched the field of ergonomics. instead of giving them an assigned reading, they created a database of articles, websites, information briefs all of the topic of ergonomics. we did a thinking routine protocol that asked the learners to share their information and come up with 12 deep questions about their reading – we will follow up on Tuesday with time to pick out the most important questions we need to understand as a part of our study.

A few of the websites students found and described regarding ergonomics

The other activity we did was to start building the skills around using Sketchup Make. Learners completed a series of tutorials that allowed them to understand the basic ways to use the toolbar in the program, and understand how to build and subtract material and a virtual space. they will actually have a design quiz next week where they need to model a specific object. Last year the group needed to design a coffee cup. This year’s challenge is a surprise!

Designing with sketchup

Working with sketchup make

So, next week we move on to the phase of prototyping after we create a virtual version of their design using Sketchup Make. Once they have a design completed, they will print it in our 3-D printers. Once this completed that, they will build a full-scale model using cardboard. once that’s completed, a judging panel will test their designs and give one more round of feedback.

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Dr. Mark Hines Blogorama

Exploring issues in 21st Century Learning, Transforming Education, EdTech, and my PostDoc Work at University of Hawaii

Monthly Archives: September 2014

A week of construction and reflection

Knowledge, Understanding and Application

On the design process, iteration and feedback