LIBRARY UPDATE: “Week 4 – CREATE a Prototype”

Last MakerMonday we engaged our students in the CREATE phase of the Design Thinking Process. To do that we shuffled them off in Lemhi Ride to the Community Pool so they could see their vision in real life. We had them take the tape measure, paper, and their minds to measure the perimeter, in hopes to take this abstract concept into reality. From the measurements we were able to watch them chart the dimension’s on paper, leaving one side free “X” for them to solve for, knowing the remaining dimensions. It’s great to see kids doing Math during the summer, having no idea that they’re doing higher level concepts for 11 year olds.

After looking at our plans, we realized the blueprints didn’t quite look right, something was off. The lengths decided for each side didn’t match up with the picture they had drawn. Therefore we showed them what it’s like to create a model to scale. Off on another piece of graph paper where 1 block was going to equal 2feet in reality they re-drew this model to scale. Now all we needed was a model scale of the Slide they wanted to see at the pool. Another adventure to the slide in the park. More tape measures, more measurements, and more scaling led to them creating a 3D image of a slide to scale with a plastic straw. This gave them great real world application skill of taking a larger concept down to a model to trying to see if the slide would fit.

Next week we’ll tackle TEST where we’ll build this model out in a 3D plane and test different angles and placements of the slide to see what works best!

Here are some highlights from our adventure!