Be a change maker; design solutions.

The next generation of problem-solvers need more than technical skills and expertise. They need experiences that allow them to see the designed world and its impact on people, collaborate and empathize across differences, and leverage their skills to redesign the world around them to meet the needs of all people in their communities.

By signing up with your email address and clicking the yellow subscribe button, you will receive this great design thinking project that your students will love! It is part of a design thinking toolkit and includes a free design thinking project, an eBook, and a suite of assessments. You will also receive a weekly email with free, members-only access to the latest blog posts, videos, podcasts and resources to help you boost creativity and spark innovation in your classroom.

Use the slippery sidewalks as inspiration to try this practical activity! Students work collaboratively to design and build a non-slip boot tread that uses friction to prevent slipping on an incline.

All materials are listed and provided including assessment and supporting media.

Here is an interview I did with an elementary student who used the design thinking process at home. He prototyped and developed a product to sell for "Market Day." According to his mother, they redesigned, remade, re-shopped, and then redesigned again. For the Ideate portion of the process, they used the Internet to generate ideas, and then went to buy supplies to prototype their product. I interviewed the student to get a glimpse of what he experienced during the learning process.

In this unit, students learned about the external parts of different animals that help them meet their needs and survive in their specific environment. These parts help animals see, hear, grasp objects, protect themselves, and move from place to place. Their parts also help them seek, find, and take in food, water and air. The goal of the unit was for students to design and create the “ultimate” animal that can survive in any environment. They used the design thinking process to develop a problem sentence, find a solution to the problem, and prototype their solution. The process involved students asking questions, making observations and gathering information on external animal parts. They used their findings to sketch out possible solutions to their problem sentence. Finally the students created their ultimate animal and proposed their solution to a “zookeeper.”

Special thanks to Nalisha Keshaw, Brianna Bedessem, Ara Cho, and Chris Bernhardi, and the whole 1C class for making this unit possible!

In this fun engineering activity, you are challenged to build a gingerbread house that meets specific design requirements.

Holiday fun!

Instructables is a website specializing in user-created and uploaded do-it-yourself projects, currently owned by Autodesk. It was created by Eric Wilhelm and Saul Griffith and launched in August 2005.

Instructables is dedicated to step-by-step collaboration among members to build a variety of projects.

-PD
-Playlists
-Writing Prompts
-Maker and Design Ideas
-Best Practices
& More!

These projects allow students the opportunity to create, test, experiment, design and collaborate to meet some seriously engaging challenges!

This is a template for planning project based learning in your classroom.

The following is a collection of resources & project plans teachers made at the Future Design School Workshop.

Rube Goldberg machines are a fun and innovative way to integrate 21st century skills into your math, science, STEM or design learning class.
Rube Goldberg machines involve using a series of complex steps to do a simple task.
Students first begin reflecting on what 21st century skills they will need to pull this activity off. Then they must make an effective plan as a group before they are able to gather their materials and build. The plan can (and likely should!) change as they work and that is fine. Students should reflect on their 21st century skills daily to give them an opportunity to regroup and refocus as needed.
This is really a fun and valuable activity! This version was done a 7/8 Math class.
Image Details
Source: www.pxleyes.com
Title : rube goldberg photoshop contest (4530), pictures page 1 – pxleyes
Dimension : 1500 x 1230
File Type : JPG/JPEG

Debbie Clark's 8th grade science students take several days to complete their Rube Goldberg contraptions. Bringing things from home, they experiment with the parts, design their contraption, and make a blueprint for it before beginning to build. This is a lesson that emphasizes cooperation, teamwork, creativity and design.

This design challenge from Chris Woods will have your students tapping into their creativity and a wealth of skills including Math to build a better shoe!

The Smithsonian Learning Lab puts the treasures of the world's largest museum, education, and research complex within reach. The Lab is a free, interactive platform for discovering millions of authentic digital resources, creating content with online tools, and sharing in the Smithsonian's expansive community of knowledge and learning.

Use the search tool to discover lots of resources on endless topics. The sky's the limit!

Working as if they were engineers, students design and construct model solar sails made of aluminum foil to move cardboard tube satellites through “space” on a string. Working in teams, they follow the engineering design thinking steps—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, redesign—to design and test small-scale solar sails for satellites and space probes. During the process, learn about Newton’s laws of motion and the transfer of energy from wave energy to mechanical energy. A student activity worksheet is provided.

In this lesson, designed for a heterogeneous group of students that includes English-language learners, students work together to plan a website based on their home knowledge. An introductory lesson outlines the structure and components of simple websites (home page, titles, headings, links). Students take home and complete a bilingual student and family interest survey, then work in groups of four or five to identify common themes among the responses. Each group makes a flow chart to think graphically about the contents of their planned website. Each student keeps a project notebook to record new ideas, summarize group work, and share the project with family members. The teacher can make the planned websites a reality using one of the online website-building platforms in the Resources list.