Improvement time!

So, when I said that I wouldn't likely be able to post every week, I didn't think that I would go this long without updating our main Fusion 10 Blog!  A lot has been happening in the last 7 weeks (seven weeks? - wow!)  We have worked through our first iteration of our mousetrap vehicles, have had an old boy who is currently employed in the bio-medical engineering field come to visit and speak to the boys, and have made a start on personal projects that connect the students to areas of engineering and problems that they are passionate about.

Before I get to catching you up on our journey over the last few weeks,  I should offer a partial explanation for the lack of posts on this blog over that time.  As most who read this blog will know, all assessments have been done in the form of student blog posts this term.  We have had no tests, essays or other more traditional forms of grading.  The reason for this is that the curriculum for the Fusion course (remember that Fusion is a design course within the Fusion program that includes other courses such as Math and Science) is very fluid.  There is no Ministry prescribed list of skills, concepts or facts that students must know.  The students, especially in the first year of the program, come into the course at a wide variety of skill and conceptual levels in a myriad of areas.  It is more effective to have students report and reflect on their learning at various points along the way rather than testing them at the end of a unit.  For the work that we have done so far, these reflections tell me much more about what a student has actually learned than any multiple choice test ever would and is more responsive to the immediate learning that is going on than essay questions as part of a unit test.  The down side to this approach to assessing the boys learning is that it takes more time on an ongoing basis to have these discussions via the blogs.  I comment on most of the blog posts and ask questions that try to get deeper thinking when I can and to clarify understanding (mine and the boys').  I think that the time is well worth it, but it means that this blog drops to a lower priority when I'm spending my time reading and commenting on the students' blogs.

Back to the last seven weeks.

We learned a lot from our first attempt at our mousetrap vehicles.  Besides building strong connections with the physics curriculum in Science, we have learned a lot about the design thinking process.  The process involves a phase of Research where we try to understand what we need to understand in order to address the specific problem at hand.  In this case, much of that research involved understanding physics concepts of potential and kinetic energy as we try to understand how the energy stored in the set mousetrap could be captured and converted into forward motion of some vehicle across a gym floor.  We struggled with the idea of Defining our problem in a succinct manner so that we would have clear direction and something to measure the success of our solutions against.  We got better at Ideating (brainstorming) as many approaches to solving the problem as possible so that we could look at the problem from different angles.  We enjoyed Prototyping our solution by building our design and getting it ready for the final Testing.  We then took our final solutions and tested them by not only measuring the distance that each vehicle traveled but also video recorded the test run in order to be able to measure the acceleration and deceleration of the vehicles so that we could understand how efficient our design actually were.  The entire time, we learned about how we could work best in our teams to accomplish our tasks.

You will see by reading their blog posts (linked on the right of this blog's home page - check for dates around October 1) that each of the boys took away something different from the process.  Some reflected on the need to improve their group's time management skills.  Others noted that there was little connection between phases in the design thinking model.  They brainstormed a number of interesting ideas in the Ideation phase and then forgot them all to make what they could when they looked at the materials in the prototyping box (imagine a junk drawer for prototyping general design problems).  Still others were simply not happy with the actual design of their vehicles and learned much about what doesn't work in terms of fabricating and materials used.

Goals for Iteration 2

From this experience, we distilled our take aways from iteration one to create four goals for iteration two of the same vehicle.  These goals are:

• Ideation: Think of at least 4 contrasting ideas
• Communication: Ensure that all group members are on the same page at all times
• Prototyping: ensure that there is a strong connection between ideation through design to prototyping
• Time Management: Ensure that time is allocated effectively