If you’re thinking about starting a Makerspace in your school, one thing you might want to consider is how to make sure kids are digging deep in their learning.  Questions to ask include:

• How can we tie the maker mindset into existing curriculum?
• How might we ensure that our students are going deep with their creativity, problem solving, and reflection?
• What learning experiences and opportunities do our students need?

These questions are way more important than, “What stuff do I buy?”

One way of encouraging deep learning is by incorporating the design thinking process.  Developed by Stanford’s dSchool, the process moves learners through phases of empathy, define, ideate, prototype, and test.  How often in school do we give our kids the chance to create, test, and then revamp their idea?  Not enough probably.  School historically has been a two step process, start and finish. Get the grade.  So much learning.  To me, basic school has been like a plain hamburger patty with no toppings and a plain bun.  Design thinking is like a ginormous bacon double cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, mayo, and onion.  The real deal.  Meaty learning to fill up kids hunger for hard fun.

So what might this look like for the primary grades?  Design thinking can work for ANY age group.  Even 4 year olds.  You just have to think about what’s important to them, what they love, and what will make their learning come alive.

Possible topics:

Design a pizza for your favorite book character.   We provided our students a blueprint to design on and discussed what imaginary toppings their favorite character would love.  After planning, or ideation, students will build their prototype pizzas with cardboard and other recycled materials and then record a video reflection.

Design a trap for a leprechaun.  During St. Patrick’s Day, students built traps, tying in the empathy piece of making sure they didn’t harm the leprechaun.  Their imaginations were on fire as they came up with amazing ideas.

Those are just two topics that we’ve tried.  It was fun to see the youngest kids getting engaged deeply in discussions with each other and develop ideas into tangible products.  Possible future projects that have been rambling in my brain are:

Primary:

Develop a movie trailer for a Mystery Number.  Make the movie trailer fun for PreK students to watch. Be sure that you don’t reveal the number, but only give clues.  Share your trailer with a PreK buddy and see if they can guess the number.  After they watch, are there any improvements you would make?

Design an exhibit at the zoo for your favorite animal.  Interview a zoologist via Skype about what the animal needs to survive. Be sure the exhibit contains what the animal needs to survive.   Design the exhibit with a cardboard model.  Return to Skype with your partner and present your project to the Zoologist.

Create a dream bedroom for a classmate.  Interview him or her to find out favorite hobbies, interests, and colors. Draw a floor plan of the bedroom and present the bedroom to your classmate, explaining why you chose the things you did. 

Develop a board game based on a part of history that interests you.  Allow others to play the game and provide feedback to you.  Make improvements on the game and produce another prototype,

Develop a set of rocket fins with the 3d printer.  After launch, determine altitudes and examine the fins of classmates.  Draw conclusions about fin design and create another prototype of your fins. 

Just a few ideas…. but the possibilities are endless!