Our 1st design challenge was so hugely successful, my teaching partner (@thehughes2) and I were excited to launch our 2nd quickfire challenge last week with the second graders. Born of a "thorn" that came up numerous times during our closing circle meetings, students were this time tasked with the challenge: "How Might We Make it Easier for Our Buddy to Get Up in the Morning?"
First Steps:
Now that we're several weeks into school, students have already begun to make friends and connections, and Mrs. Hughes and I want to continue to push students to get to know everyone in our class a little better, so we started the challenge by partnering students up with others they may not normally socialize with. This also meant that we needed to take time to lead a mini-lesson on how to react kindly to being paired up with someone that they may not have chosen on their own (kind words, kind reactions, kind body/facial expressions)-- "yay!", "thanks" or a smile and a nod were reactions we practiced as students were partnered up (mostly) randomly.We also introduced students to the idea of innovation, what it means to think like an innovator, what
design thinking is, and what the CSI design thinking model looks like. During these first two quickfire challenges, we focused mostly the empathy piece of the design thinking mindset, or SEEK in our CSI model. What does it mean to empathize? How can we seek to better understand our classmates and those in our community?
Interviewing a Partner:
Our quickfire challenge cycles involve empathy interviews (ask your buddy questions to get to know them better), ideation sketches, prototyping time and presenting to our partners. Before releasing students to work on the challenge, Mrs. Hughes and I acted out what an interview might look like, and what types of questions we might need to ask to learn about our partner's morning. On our first day of school challenge, we had students brainstorm potential interview questions whole class before connecting them with their partners.
After modeling how to interview, we gave students a simple template for recording their learning (based on a template I used at the d.school training at Stanford) and gave them 3-5 minutes to take turns interviewing each other.
Ideating and Prototyping:
Students then took what they learned about their partners and quickly brainstormed their prototype ideas, and sketched and labeled those ideas on their recording sheets. We timed the process (about 5 minutes) to keep everyone on track and moving towards their final goal. After a quick "teacher check" of their designs and reasoning, we launched them into prototyping. We limited the number of materials students were allowed to use to 5 items to start (both for creating creative constraints, but also out of necessity-- we didn't want to run out of materials) and gave them only 25 minutes to put something together.Outcomes:
Before presenting their gifts, we asked our 2nd graders to record themselves in their Seesaw portfolios explaining their projects. It was a great way for us to check in again on their thinking, how well they listened to their partners, and for parents and families to hear how their children spent the day focusing on someone else's needs. As students presented to their partners, the smiles on their faces were priceless. Even more heartwarming was the fact that while many started the challenged bummed that they couldn't work with their friends, by the end they were running up to us asking us to
take pictures of them with their new buddy. We couldn't have asked for a better outcome!Another success was watching some of my students who regularly do not want to read or write or speak for me in class, jump into to all of those tasks with enthusiasm when it was it was a part of a maker and design task.
These quickfire challenges have also provided great insight for me into which students in our classes need more support with executive functioning skills (like time mangement, organization), which students are struggling with perfectionist tendencies that hinder their ability to get projects done in a timely manner, and which of them are having a tough time thinking divergently or outside the box.
