Week 8

This weeks class was focused on a new project, which consists of an afternoon spent teaching children to be innovative.  I really liked the idea of this project because teaching is something I feel comfortable doing, and I was looking forward to see what ideas and innovative prototypes em could get from our lesson. We had only one class to plan this project and with such little time we decided not to come up with a whole new idea, but instead to adapt the idea we had used for our first innovation project. I think this worked well as we were all very familiar with the process and so able to teach it better.

Our initial 'problem' had been titled "how might we create a more organised, multifunctional space in the school hallways - accommodating for group work, individual study and recreational time". Next week will take this problem, and allow the children to come up with innovative ways that they could solve it. We will do this in 4 steps;

Feel : understanding and empathising with the user

Imagine : coming up with solutions to the problem

Do : creating a prototype for their solution

Share : sharing their ideas with the class

Due to a the fact that we are unsure of how many pupils and how much time we will have, we came up with a flexible teaching plan which follows the model described above. Group work with such a tight deadline was good for our group, as we learned to listen to every idea and to quickly decide which were worth keeping and which wouldn't be feasible in the short time and with the lack of resources we had.

This innovation lab class also included an evaluation of our blogs so far, and a briefing of the new criteria for our blogs. I thought this was very important as blogging has been difficult so far due to a mix up in what we were actually meant to be doing. Now I feel like I know a little better what I'm meant to be writing about and documenting about our classes.

This is the flexible teaching plan that we have come up with;

"How might we create a more organised, multifunctional space in the school hallways - accomodating for groupwork, individual study and recreational time."

 

* : If we have more time... 

Roles: We will split us up during the groupwork to coach. One of us (it will change) will give the instructions to everyone at the same time.


Feel 
; Understand user-empathise 

- introduce question/problem

- Spliting up the groups ; imagine you are a different age-group (different perspectives) 

- Depending on the size of the groups, 3 to 5 pupils in each group.


- We tell the pupils our problem  ”How might we...”
Walking debate:  Do you reconize the problem? Yes or no - Walk to a corner
. Pupils tell each other their opinions


*A small walk trough the hallways to observe and reflect about the debat


*We tell the pupils what the children and teachers told us about the problem
(too much noise in the hallways,…)

Imagine ; 
Solutions:  walk on the moon phase

- Brainstorm post-its (individually) 
We prefer to do this in the hallways, but it can be anywhere.


*The pupils make their own criteria for a good solution and reflect: do our ideas fit with the criteria?


*Second brainstorm  with coaching

imagine you are …
-a football star
-school principal
-your teacher
-your mum
-Mickey mouse
-Justin Bieber
-Barbie


*Think of something that is... -Small as a peanut
-Bigger then a house
-very cheap
-very expensive


*Walk alone to think  pupils get the chance to write more ideas down.


- Pick your 2 favourite ideas (each pupil) 


- Vote in the group , end up with 1 solution each

Do ; 
Create solution/prototyping

- Draw the solution incoperating the idea.

- Or draw an other one his/her favourite solution

- Choose one or more ideas 
”fight”: other group can choose the ’best’ idea

- Prototyping; We will give them options e.g. 

- create; a story: newspaper article, a letter, idea of a text for on the school website

- An ad: promote the idea

- A model: 3D

- A role-play: situation
(We can broaden the prototype)


Share ; Presenting the solution to the other groups.

*The others can write ”Likes” and ”Questions” on post-its

- Each group will reflect on these likes and questions.

- ”Who will you really like to listen to your solution?”