Design Thinking in Pre Prep!

For the past two years, I have had the great pleasure of spending two lessons a week teaching in our Early Learning Centre. My role has been to provide the pre-Prep students the opportunity to experience Design Technology in its simplest form and also to introduce the students to problem solving using Design Thinking. I’m High School trained but have been working for a number of years with primary students; however, pre-Prep, has been a completely new and exciting experience for me. 

One of things I love about Design Thinking is that it can be as complex or as simple as you like. It can be used over a lesson, a term or even a semester. And there is no age limit as these 4-year-old students demonstrated.  

Our Early Learning Centre is underpinned by the Reggio Emilia philosophy of learning wherein the students’ interests drive the curriculum. In one particular classroom, cars are a great point of discussion so their teacher, Mrs H, challenged them with a provocation, “How do we look after our cars?” In that first week, students built cars from cardboard boxes. They added features like headlights, steering wheels and switches. They designed and built a petrol pump and built a car wash which was very popular for washing cars, but very cramped. In the second week, the cars needed repairs and the students’ interests shifted to what happens in an Auto shop - repairs, mechanics, maintenance checklists and tools needed to fix cars were all created and enacted.   

In discussion with Mrs H, she mentioned to me that she had shown the students the car wash clip from the Pixar movie Sharks Tale and said the kids loved the song and had asked if they could wash a car. With this in mind, along with the fact that we had just been gifted a very large box, I decided to challenge the kids to design and make a life size, working car wash.

These students are only 4 years old and can’t read, but I wanted to use the language we use in Design Thinking. I wanted to use words like Design, Create, Ideate, Prototype, Investigate and, with that in mind, we started with our Engage phase of our Model.

The initial discussion was prompted by thoughts about who would use a car wash and how big it had to be to suit different vehicles.  What follows is their description (as told to me) of the process they undertook.

 

We did a little drama play of taking our school bus through a car wash. We thought about what happened in a car wash and the different stages of cleaning. Then we watched Videos and learnt about car washes. Finally, to make our thinking clear, we drew a flow chart representing the different stages of the car wash including, wetting the car, adding soap, scrubbing and drying the car.

When it came to Ideating, four of the Pre-Prep Team, with some older students accompanying them, visited the School’s Possibility Hub. Our Possibility hub contains tons of industrial waste materials for just this sort of project. Students explored lots of different materials to suit the various stages on the flow chart. For some, there were lots of options and so a collaborative discussion on what to use and how to use it was conducted.

We returned to class to show our friends the materials we were thinking about and to explain how we were going to use them. There was also time for our friends to give us feedback and they had lots of ideas.

When it came to Prototyping, the excitement went to another level. Everybody wanted to help which was very difficult to manage, so shifts of workers were set up.

We made rollers for our car wash. We also made water jets, soap curtains and water sprays as well as drying jets. A pay machine was added to the front and a secret curtain to drive through at the start. It was starting to look amazing but we soon discovered that unless you were inside the car wash, you couldn’t see what was happening. We decided that even though car washes didn’t have windows, we wanted ours to have windows so everyone could see inside.   

Last week we unveiled our finished car wash to the rest of our class. We invited special guests and showed them our video story of how we designed and created this car wash. We presented to our guests the materials we chose to use and the thinking behind the choice of the materials and the design of the car wash.

I was immensely proud of these kids and what they had achieved. However, even prouder were the kids themselves. They had such excited and proud faces. The video showed them designing and building the car wash. They spoke with confidence and pride when describing the process. And most importantly, when I stood back and watched them play in the car wash, I saw them explaining to their friends how things worked and what to look at. This play had a whole new level of learning attached to it.

Design Thinking is a powerful process of problem identifying and solving. One that large organisations and successful companies use to be innovative and stay ahead of their competitors. Central to this process are the dispositions that can be developed even in the youngest of minds! Skills such as learning to communicate and collaborate with others. The ability to use their imagination, creativity and curiosity to develop, make and explore ideas. Mindsets like persistence, give it a go and learn from mistakes when it doesn’t work. These skills/mindsets that will be essential for students to become the innovative designers and problem solvers of the future.  I am very lucky. I watch the creation of these thinkers every day in the classroom.

The Power of collaboration

A Teachers job is to inspire their Students and instil in them the love of learning. To do this we have to continually learn ourselves. This is something that I love to do predominantly by connecting with other educators and learning from and sharing with them. Typically, I do this within my own area of expertise; design. However, this week I was part of an amazing learning experience and one that I learnt as much from, as our students did. 

When chatting with a 4th year University student currently doing her practicum in our school, Molly enquired about Design Thinking and the possibility of applying it to a Science unit she had been working on with Year five students. She had been working on how light reflects and travels. I was really keen to help out because this was a great opportunity for me to impart design thinking away from my normal area of teaching as well as helping an enthusiastic pre-service teacher.

As she explained the unit and I explained the framework for Design Thinking, it soon became really clear that there were lots of opportunities to marry this science task within a design thinking framework. In fact, one of our biggest problems was limiting the scope to suit the timeslot we had. We set out with some clear goals. We wanted;

- The students to be hands on and engaged. To learn through doing.

- The task to have a real-world connection.

- The students to learn about how light or sight is reflected

- To develop curiosity in the learning

As one of our goals was to have the students curious about their learning we knew we had a starting point. As the students arrived they noticed tables lying on their sides in a large circle on the grassed area outside the room. Without saying more than we needed, we asked the students to hide behind a table and stay out of sight. If we spotted them, they had to sit out. Before long, the conversations we heard, confirmed that we already had them curious. “What is happening?”… “Why are we doing this?”… “What are they doing?”…

From there we delivered the brief. The scene was, they were in the trenches in WW2. They didn’t know what was going on above them. They didn’t know who was out there. Their challenge was; ‘How might we reflect light or sight to communicate and observe? ‘

An important part of Design Thinking is collaboration. We partnered the students to work together and they set about their task. Again, one of our goals was to learn through doing, so we wanted the kids to make, test and experiment. To learn through failing but keep trying until they came to a solution. They had access to a large range of industrial waste materials that hopefully also sparked curiosity and set their imagination alight with ideas.  

By the end of this lesson we saw very few periscopes that worked. What were finished, looked very ordinary and were just holding together. In hindsight, we really needed more time to complete this task. However, this task was far from a failure in terms of students learning. Things we heard, and saw were;

§  High levels of engagement

§  Amazing curiosity

§  Great collaboration and sharing of ideas

§  Great use of imagination with materials and ideas

In reflecting with this class in the following lesson, Molly asked them what they had learnt from this lesson. Some of the responses were;

§  ‘If you keep trying, you’ll work it out’

§  ‘To listen to other’s ideas’

§  ‘To keep an open mind and not just think your idea is the best’

§  ‘Working as a team you can get more ideas’

We know they learnt about using mirrors to reflect sight or light. We heard the conversation’s and saw them talking and experimenting with angles, materials and mirrors. We know they understood real life uses, because we reflected on this with them after. This task was a valuable lesson and by using Design thinking, allowed the learning process, to be more important than the product.

At the start of this blog I said I learnt as much from this as our students did. Although I use Design Thinking regularly, and talk about things like collaboration, sharing of ideas, failing forward and the other depositions associated with it, this was a valuable experience for me to be part of planning a lesson collaboratively away from my normal teaching area. To listen and combine idea’s and experiences, to create an amazing learning experience for the students.

Regardless of who you are, how experienced you are or think you are, or what your area of expertise is, we can always learn from others. That is something that I have taken away from activity this and something I will be encouraging in my students from here on. For this I thank Molly and hope that this learning experience has been as valuable for her as it was for her students and me.