Science Week
Next week is science week, and the topic is: Species Survival – More Than Just Sustainability.
In the early days of Make+Meld, we spent many hours picking apart curriculum and designing projects that would line up with it whilst offering both teachers and students the benefits that we know come with our workshops.
Some of our best projects though, came from teachers reaching out to us and asking us to design an incursion which linked-in with a subject matter that they were working on.
With Yeronga State School, we designed our most popular Design a toy with moving parts incursion
With Dutton Park State School, we designed Our Secure Environment Challenge for year 6, Our Showtime Puppets for their year 1, Re-purpose It for year 4/5s, and an incursion that fits in perfectly with next week's Science Week theme: Design for Nature, for year 5.
And with Graceville State School we came up with our Playground Design Challenge (which we have since improved on though this is still in prototype phase)
In our Design for Nature Incursion, which we started with Dutton Park, and have since gone on to do at many other schools, students are challenged to solve real world problems as they consider the impacts of drought or fire on native animals and design a solution that assists animals to access shelter, food or water.
Students do all of their inquiry and design in-class, and get briefed by the teacher via our online presentation (watch here), or we come out and present the design challenge to them in order to get them as excited about the challenge as possible.
Once they have designed their solutions, we come in for a 1.25 hour class session with a large variety of specially selected tools and materials and assist the kids in making a scale model of their design solution.
Seeing how students think, design and make, gives me hope for the future. We have seen some great designs over the years, including some of which could possibly actually work!
