Year 7 Design Thinking Days
This week, Year 7 were involved in 2 days of ‘Design Thinking’.
Design Thinking is a problem-solving process which involves teamwork, creativity, planning and organisation. For this project, students combined their learning from science and visual art to firstly create fictitious ceramic animals and then apply the design thinking process to produce safe environmental enclosures for them.
The girls worked in small groups to discuss and give feedback on their ideas to ultimately deliver a poster, a digital model and a 3D model of their creature’s enclosure. They were asked to empathise, to identify the needs of their animals and define their problem in order to meet those needs.
They loved the cross-pollination of subjects and ideas in well-considered feedback to help them modify their concepts and produce their prototypes.
“Feedback showed up things we had not considered before and the ideas improved our enclosure design,” Alice said. “This project is lots of fun, and it’s good to think about what the creature in the wild needs and then how we should make the enclosure.”
Their final projects were panel-judged, with a number of awards given in the categories of Best Pitch, Best Model Prototype, Most Effective Use of Materials, Most Creative, Most Suitable Design for the Creature, and Overall winner (The Ateena). The Elekey won the People’s Choice award.