Building By Design

10/7/2017

For the second week of school, we wanted to give students the opportunity to practice the things that we were focusing on with our Engineering and Teamwork unit. Our primary goal was to design a group-worthy experience that would allow students to work in a team for an extended period of time and get a taste of the engineering design process. This project is by no means perfect, but it does a great job of providing a "low floor/high ceiling" type of challenge that allows us to build a culture of collaboration in our classrooms right away.

Setting the Stage

To start of this project, students are given the following information outlining the scenario and task.

You and your group represent a design think tank that has been contacted by a well known toy company. This company is reaching out to talented young individuals such as yourselves with a challenge to design the next great modular building toy (modular means that it’s made of several individual pieces that can be assembled and taken apart: building blocks, k’nex, legos, tinker toys, etc.).

The Task:
Design, build, and market a modular building toy prototype according to the client’s requirements

Human Centered Design

My school district is placing a stronger emphasis in the "Human Centered Design" process made famous by Stanford's d.school. This process is really just another way of organizing the engineering design process so we focused on organizing this project around the same language that is becoming more prevalent in our district.

Before really diving into the project itself, it was important to give students an idea of what human centered design is and make sure that everyone is comfortable with the language being used. The video "What is Human-centered Design?" does a good job of quickly outlining the process and why it is important.

What is Human-centered Design? from IDEO.org on Vimeo.

Empathize and Define

,In the engineering world, the task at hand is rarely cleanly defined with a list of requirements. Instead, there is a long list of "Nice to Haves" and "Need to Haves" that need to be balanced when determining a solution. These criteria and constraints come from the consumer and through interviews and listening we can begin to empathize and define the problem. In this project, the requirements come as a list of requests from kids that want a new modular building toy. It is up to the students to interpret the request and turn it into a quantitative requirement whenever possible.

Consumer Requests

“I want to be able to build a tower as tall as me!” - Jonathan (3 years old)
“I think it would be really cool if it could be strong enough to hold my 3 month old baby brother” - Maddie (7 years old)
“I only want to play with a construction toy that looks cool” - Tobias (13 years old)
“I like to build bridges with my toys, it would be awesome if I could make one that can go over my shoe!” - Eva (9 years old)
“I only play with my toys outside and I don’t want my tower to topple in the wind!” - Carly (13 years old)
“My brother is always bumping my table, I don’t want the tower to fall because the table moves…” - Peyton (11 years old)
“I really like it when my building toys come with instructions for some different designs” - Peter (12 years old)

Manufacturing Limits

“We can’t afford to produce more than 3 unique modular construction set pieces. This means that you can have more than 3 different pieces but only 3 different designs. Each piece within a design should be pretty much identical to the others”
“Our packaging plant is really basic (it’s an old shoebox folding machine) so all of your pieces must fit within the dimensions of a standard shoebox”

Prototype Guidelines

Since it’s costly to set up machinery for a test design, you must provide a proof of concept that is made out of paper products (paper, tagboard, cardboard, etc), glue, and tape. All other materials must be approved

Ideate

It is important to give space for groups to brainstorm both individually and with their teams. To ensure this happens, I dedicate the first ten minutes of the second day for silent individual brainstorming and sketching. Once the timer runs out, only then are they allowed to get back with their groups and pool their ideas. Last year's groups came up with a lot of geometric block building toys. I was hoping to see more idea diversity this year so before brainstorm time, I simply stated "modular building toys do not have to be blocks". With this slight nudge, this year's projects were way more interesting and diverse.

Rules for Brainstorming

Go for numbers, as many ideas as possible
Be visual, sketches help
Headline your idea, then quickly move on
One voice at a time. Everyone Shares
Don’t judge, be positive and encouraging
Build on the ideas of others
Stay on Topic
Encourage wild ideas

Prototype

Prototyping takes the largest block of time in this week-long project. With the constraints of limited unique part designs and overall packaging space, most groups end up requiring a pretty major manufacturing operation to create all of their individual pieces. This is what makes this project truly group worthy. There really isn't any way that one person can reasonably take over and be responsible for making all of the piece; it must be a group effort.

Test

While the criteria provided to the groups are in the form of qualitative consumer requests, the tests that they need to demonstrate are a series of objectively (mostly) measurable tests. Since the "customers requests" belong to individual kids, the groups do not have to satisfy every test at the same time. I just had them call me over when they had built a structure to satisfy each individual test.

Since part of the goal with the criteria was for students to quantitatively define their task from a series of requests, I kept this list of tests secret until testing day. Each of these tests have a row in the rubric.

Height - 95 cm
Strength - Can hold four textbooks
Bridge - Over the toe of a group members shoe
Stability - Table bump and wind
Appearance - Looks marketable and interesting
Instructions - At least two different designs included
All pieces fit inside the box
No more than three unique designs are used

Communicate

At the end of the project, each group had about 2-4 minutes to present their product to the class in a Shark Tank style presentation. The rubric leaves the requirements for this presentation wide open so we saw a huge range of ideas and approaches. This year provided a good deal of commercials and a bunch of in person demonstrations similar to the Shark Tank model.

In the Classroom

All of the information above is included in the Building by Design google doc which I give my students a link to create their own copy. One person in each group creates a copy, shares it with me and the others in their group. This document serves as the repository for storing information that they determine about the criteria and constraints as well as photos documenting their design process.

I loved having this central space for groups to collaborate in. It also prevented any issues with groups losing the information when a group member was gone for the day.

In the end, this document is where I went to when I looked for evidence of their design process.

Building by Design.pdf
File Size:	331 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Building by Design | Google Doc

The following is the schedule that we used this year and how it aligned with the stages in the human centered design process. The first week when most of the designing and building took place was also our homecoming week so it was pretty crazy in general with students coming in and out for various activities. At the end of the project, teachers generally felt like it went on too long and students wished they had more time so it's probably right were it needs to be ;)

Grading

This year, we graded the project as the first summative test score of the year. The scores for each group came from a combination of the things that they added to their google doc, their performance on the customer tests, their marketing efforts during the presentation, and the overall group work that they exhibited. I printed out a rubric sheet for each group and recorded scores as they satisfied the requirements.

The "Wow Factor" category is always inciting for the students. They always want me to provide them with an example of something that would be considered worthy of those extra points but I tell them that that would defeat the purpose. The whole idea behind the "Wow Factor" is that it provides me with the opportunity to reward students for going beyond anything that I asked of them and impress me with something totally outside of the box.

Building by Design - Rubric.pdf
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Building by Design - Rubric | Google Doc

Reflection

Overall, I was happy with the level of collaboration and thoughtful creatively that I saw in my classes. It's always interesting to see how some groups just click right away and approach the project with a fresh and interesting outlook while others just make the simplest blocks that they can. I don't want to show examples because I think it could limit their divergent thinking, but at the same time, I wish these groups could see what other possibilities exist while there is still time to adjust their designs and refocus their efforts.

As always, I asked them for their feedback on the project and they had some interesting insights to offer:

What did you like/dislike about the project?

"I liked how we could build whatever we wanted with few requirements"

"I liked and disliked how much freedom we had in this project, it left a lot of creativity for the design but sometimes it also left the question of what are supposed to be doing or how is this supposed to be done."

"I liked how much flexibility we had. The constraints weren't shape related, the shapes just had to support certain things."

"The project was fun I just wish that it didn't have to be three pieces and fit inside a shoe box"

"I liked all of the freedom and creativity involved within the project. I also liked building it and the challenges it brought along the way."

"It was fun to build the things and come up with different ideas on designs and actually seeing come to life from a drawing"

Why do you think we started this semester with a project like this?

"To work better in groups, and look at the way different people approach a problem."

"To help with teamwork and working together and having conversations and working it out"

"To start it off with something that both has to do with what we will be learning about and something fun."

"I think we started this semester doing a project like this so that we could meet new people, become more comfortable with school work, and to grow in knowledge about science and about working with other people."

"Because it helps us just get to know who we're going to be working with for the rest of the year and get used to the technology we will be using "