A New Concept: Design Briefs

In today's lesson we are going to complete a task that sounds kind of fun. We are going to create a Design Brief. Greg has mentioned that the process of a design brief has been altered according to VELS in recent years. He spoke about the positives of completing a design brief and the appropriate ways to deal with stationary in the classroom.

Today's design brief is to Make The Frog Jump. These are the materials required:
A small piece of cardboard
A rubber band
Some sticky tape and
a tiny paper frog


(apparently later on in this session we will we learning how to create online games... excellent!!)

Anyway, here we go... in our pair, Chanel and I will attempt to make our little froggie jump!!


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The Outcome...

After much careful and deep thinking, Chanel and I completed out Design Brief document and used the information to successfully make our frog jump using only the materials provided.

Our Design Brief looked like this:

Problem to be solved:
We need to make the frog jump

Resources:
paper frog
cardboard strip
sticky tape
elastic band

Investigate/ Design:
Fold cardboard several times to make it spring. Cardboard needs to have air within the bends in order to allow a spring motion to occur. We need to use the elastic band to enhance the severity of the spring motion, being elastic, it is reasonable to think that if wrapped around the card it should assist the spring to create a higher flight. Obviously human power and control will need to be included to allow the motion to initiate.

Process:
We bend the card only once having one side longer than the other and placed the cardboard laying on the shorter length side to allow the raised longer side to act as a tab. The elastic band was wrapper long-ways around the card to assist with the spring. We push downwards the tabbed card side and let go to create a spring motion.

Analyse/ Evaluate:
Our frog did jump successfully and was able to spring quite a height and distance due to the design we produced.

I found this design technology activity to be fun, interesting and interactive. Students would enjoy completing this kind of task, as they are able to challenge their problem solving skills and really work hard as a group/team to create their design. If this is used as a lesson in class, it also assists students in their literacy development as they are required to use these skills to compete the actual design brief as part of their invention production. I hope to be able to apply an activity like this one in my next teaching round.

In addition, I was really pleased with our efforts, and it was great to go around the room to see other groups' designs and see how their frogs were able to jump. I didn't realise there would be so many ways! In the classroom, this would be a great opportunity to introduce the students to peer assessment whilst completing this activity and viewing / assessing other group's designs.