Makey Makey Lucy Snooks and Ed Charlwood Latymer Upper School @mrcharlwood
Following recent seismic events Design & Technology we spent time revising our Schemes of Work, considering how we could address a number of perceived issues and face up to some of the challenges the subject were grappling with. (1) How could we generate open and cross-curricular projects without losing the rigor of our previous schemes of work? (2) How might we transfer ownership of projects to students and address the fixation on a ‘take home’? (3) How can we assess ‘creativity’ in a collaborative and cross-curricular project? Our current Programme of Study is built on a process of a focussed/skills task followed by an application task format, working in half termly rotations. We decided to focus on our Year 9 CADCAM module as this where we had seen hints of outstandingly creative work and high level technical thinking, but student feedback suggested that they were not excited by the artefacts that they had ‘designed’ and made, for example, toothbrush holders. Although there was a clear skills rationale for these mini-projects; for example; learning the skills of dimensioning, raster and vector cutting, the outcomes were very procedural, rarely valued by students and offered limited opportunities to reflect on the design process. So how to find the
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balance between skills, process, logistical constraints and open/inspirational tasks? Initially we reviewed what was working well. We had recently begun to use 2mm corrugated card simply because it allowed for a much faster manufacturing time compared to 3mm acrylic and plywood. This increased speed allowed us to introduce the concept of iterative design and ongoing reflective loops during the design process. We had also successfully used a quick turnaround design to manufacture introduction where our classes all designed a small item to be cut in 3mm acrylic, but to overcome the logistical issues of sending, saving and processing files we introduced the concept of batch manufacture where the class voted on their favourite design and this was the one fabricated for the whole group. We also had developed another quick skills task to teach the students to vectorise shapes and to create tolerance fit slots to allow CAD design to move from 2D to 3D. To do this we set task to design chess pieces to make a class set; differentiation came in the form of the piece chosen as a pawn has a relatively simple 2 planes of reflective symmetry while a knight does not and therefore needs deeper creative and problem solving thinking. The real revelation in all this came with the