7th Grade Plantastic Voyage!

As mentioned in the post about our faculty visit to the Lighthouse Creativity Lab, one of the newly redesigned lessons that emerged from our visit belonged to a science teacher in our Middle School. Sergina Bach was able to fully redesign a traditional lesson about photosynthesis into a comprehensive design thinking experience - and when she returned, her entire 7th grade science team enthusiastically adopted the project across all 7th grade science classes.

The project was called "The Plantastic Voyage" and it was created to apply student learning about photosynthesis and plants by having them create a means to transport and grow plants during a mission to Mars, as well as creating a way to establish the plants once on Mars. Sergina took this project, integrated her new learning about Tinkercad, iterative thinking, and student-centered design processes, and set students off on an engaging and fun design thinking project.

Sergina and her colleagues bravely ventured into the world of Tinkercad - a first for our School. Tinkercad is a free software program that allows for 3d drafting using simple tools. It is very intuitive, generally speaking, and the students appeared to like working with the program. While we did not have the ability to 3d print student products prior to the final presentations, we discovered that the students enjoyed the digital drafting process enormously, and we saw them iterate their designs from words to basic drawings to 3d renderings, each time with improvements to the design. This project definitely highlighted that 3d printers would be something that would greatly enhance design thinking projects, and so we will be discussing ways to integrate these on both of our campuses.

On the left, a student's hand-drawn iteration. On the right, their vision realized in TinkerCad.

During the student work time on this project, I was able to visit all classrooms and personally experience the students' enthusiasm and excitement as they imagined, designed, and created their solutions. One one memorable visit, I was treated to having students give me a practice run of their project presentations, after which they asked for feedback. Not only was it great to see their enthusiasm in their presentations, I was surprised when they so openly asked for critique of their work, and more surprised when they thoughtfully considered the feedback given. In another class, I was treated to a student volunteering to get feedback from the full class on their prototype presentation. The reason I was surprised by all of these things is that my observations denote a turning point in terms of student process of creation in their projects - not so long ago students would have finished their project and been... done. Now, they approach their work as more iterative process, and before being finished, they test out their work and seek feedback.

Students loved the ability to create CAD models and also prototype models for this project!

In a couple of cases, we were able to 3d render the student's thinking. Here's a 3d print of a student's concept for a plant incubator that would keep plants alive on the space ship and on Mars too: