Zach and Tony exploring the mousetrap

It was an interesting week in Fusionland with the beginning of our first true design challenge.  As you can read in the student blogs, they were tasked with designing a mousetrap vehicle.  The only real restriction in this process is that they are not going to be using our new digital fabrication tools for any aspect of the construction of the vehicles.  It has been interesting to see what questions come up in the process from the definition of the word vehicle to wondering if the mousetrap had to actually remain intact and be used as designed.  As a teacher working through this assignment for the first time, I intentionally left things pretty open-ended (as I am prone to do).  While this can make things messy as we work through ideas that I might not have considered and potentially having to re-clarify the assignment as we go, it opens up the process to all sorts of thinking and questioning.  The alternative would be to restrict the design with so many constraints that the resulting vehicles are independently designed copies of the same thing. 

Another interesting concept that popped up this week came through the students' introductory blog posts.  It became clear that there was a wide range in the sense of purpose that students were bringing to Fusion.  Some have very clear, long-standing passions that they felt Fusion might help them explore.  Others are more vague and feel that they are "mathy" or "sciency" and that Fusion might be a fun place to hang out.  The ultimate goal of Fusion is for the students to be able to identify problems worth solving and to use their STEM skills to solve those problems.  To be able to identify problems worth solving, the students need to have some sense of what areas of the STEM world they are excited about.  It becomes really interesting to explore ideas that cross what would be considered hard boundaries from a high school subject standpoint. 

We took advantage of an opportunity that surfaced when a Science class became available.  We used this class to introduce the idea of 80/20 time.  Students were asked to spend much of this "extra" period to explore ideas in the STEM world that might appeal to them, to identify projects that they might want to explore, or to to simply get better grounded in what fields of interest might appeal to them.  We hope to be able to take some time every week or two (roughly once every five classes) to explore personally relevant topics and perhaps work on personally-driven projects.  The aim would be to have the design and fabrication skills along with the science and math content knowledge develop in parallel to the realization of personal passions so that much more time could be devoted to working on those real-world problems worth solving that have personal meaning to each student.  Every student should leave Fusion with an idea of what direction they might want to head in the Grade 11 & 12 years and on into university.  Better yet, they might already be developing ideas and pursuing projects that lead them in exciting and innovative directions.