Monday, July 2, 2018

The Most Magnificent Thing: Making Design Thinking Available Through Children’s Literature

A few weeks ago at the Ignite, Inspire, Innovate Conference in Stillwater I attended a session entitled Making Design Thinking Available Through Children’s Literature led by David Stricker from St. Catherine University. In this session, David highlighted the use of children's picture books to help teach design and engineering to students. 

The main book he showed was called The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires shown above. I had seen it years ago but had forgotten about it, so it was a good refresher. In the story a girl has an idea for an invention, "the most magnificent thing," and goes about building it. She works through all the steps of the design process, testing things out by trying various materials and building multiple prototypes. She spends time tinkering and observing. Her dog is an assistant in the story. She also experiences frustrations and failure, but persists and in the end is successful. 

It's a great story that really could result in some powerful conversations with students about their work and the process they go through when brainstorming and creating something. In fact, some elementary teachers in the room spoke about how they had found this book helpful with their own students. It's nice to have a main character who is female--David mentioned in his research and experience using this book, female students appreciated this and that it wasn't an issue noticed by male students. Other texts that were mentioned included What Do You Do With An Idea?Beautiful Oops!Rosie Revere the Engineer, and Iggy Peck Architect. Another attendee mentioned Accidents May Happen- 50 Inventions Discovered by Mistake by Charolette Jones. 

In addition to talking about children's literature to help teach design thinking, David pointed out is that engineering and design thinking doesn’t need robots or be expensive. We can find conceptually rich, inexpensive projects in everyday for students. For example, he described having students work on re-designing a paperclip or pop tab/can openers (working with levers, pressure, the need to keep the tab with the can). In another example, he described the task of having students redesign a cardboard lunchbox, and comparing box lunch containers from various restaurants. Each of these tasks gets students to be inquisitive and work through basic principles of engineering. You can also easily have the students work as a team collaboratively. One other resource to check out that David shared which looks good is EIE, Engineering is Elementary.

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