Futurists' Fair - Week 3

How can we help to reduce the impact that humans have on the environment?

Students pitched their ideas for the "big picture" problem that they want to solve for the Futurists' Fair. They voted and the majority of students agreed that the impact that humans have on the environment (mainly pollution) was the issue they would address. This is the collaborative video that a small group of students created to explain what their problem is and why it is important.

We are using the 6 Ds of Design Thinking as a framework for their problem-solving. Once they had decided on the problem it was time to brainstorm potential STEM solutions to their problem. This is where we DREAM and start to imagine and brainstorm possible solutions. It's usually the stage my classroom starts getting loud; there's a buzz of ideas and excitement and they really start to collaborate and build on each other's ideas. This is probably the part that is the most rewarding for me as a teacher, I walk around the room and marvel at the creativity, and step back to listen in to the critical thinking and problem-solving conversations students are having independently:

"But how would a waterproof robot work though, how would it would actually collect the rubbish without harming sea animals?"

"Well, maybe it would have a special filter that detects whether something is made of plastic. I guess I need to think a bit more."

"Who would use your product?"

"Is that realistic, could you really build it?"

"That is an awesome idea, can I work with you on that? I think we could make it go viral!"

The thing about student-led learning is that it often goes in a direction that I wouldn't have thought of! If it had been up to me as the teacher I probably would have chosen poverty or food security as the "big picture" problem; many of my students are directly impacted by poverty and I thought that would be quite empowering for them. Then I really liked one of the pollution ideas, that we could help lessen the impact of air pollution by creating protective domes. Students would come up with a way to keep the dome at the ideal temperature for growing trees and/or food sources. But the student who came up with that idea also had plenty more ideas and he chose to go down a different direction.

Perhaps that's one of the things that excites me about teaching STEM, I can never predict where our learning will take us and I'm always pleasantly suprised by the outcome!

Here are some of the ideas that students have decided to develop further:

   

Once students had some ideas about what they might like to create as a STEM solution, we went back to the “Discover” stage of the design thinking process, where they thought about the user of the solution. They used canva to create empathy maps to think about what the users see, say, hear, think and feel.

This is the empathy map that one group created:

"The Recycle Dash App is aimed towards young people our age and older. We thought that it could also appeal to anyone who likes playing interactive games on their phones, so maybe families could get involved too."

Futurists' Fair - Week 2

Prior to beginning our second week of the Futurists' Fair project, I wanted to link this work to the professional development I participated in at STEM X Academy with CSIRO future scenarios. As a whole class group, the Year 5/6s looked at a few short videos produced by CSIRO and then unpacked some information from CSIRO's report, Australia 2030: Navigating our uncertain future. This report details a scenarios-based outlook for Australia's future.

I then used the future scenarios as prompts for small group discussions, and this helped to tune students into the “bigger picture” of problems we face now and in the future at a local and more global level. The main scenario students looked at was about 'Planetary Pushback' and the impact that humans are having on the environment.  Some students had expressed interest in invasive species, so they looked at environmental impacts. Students had some very deep and interesting discussions, I loved being a fly on the wall! The future scenario work was a really effective way to tap into the problems that concern my students, the big questions and worries that they have about their future world and how they would solve those issues.

For the second stage of our Futurists' Fair work, I made a quick "flipped classroom" video using the student app Seesaw to set the stage. I wanted students to choose just one idea that they felt passionate about and come up with a quick persuasive presentation to convince others to vote for their idea. To save time, I borrowed some animation clips from CSIRO's Australian National Outlook video for my background:

Students were able to decide whether they would prefer to work alone or in a small group for this component of the project. We used post-it notes to list what they were most passionate about and would like to work on. This process helped students to form groups with people that had the same 'big ideas'. We noticed that most ideas fit into four main categories: Poverty/homelessness, Endangered Species, Human impact on pollution and climate change and Invasive species. 

All of my students ended up finding someone that had a similar idea and got to work researching their problem. Things didn't quite go to plan! My students were so invested in their research and persuasive presentations that I allowed them to keep going for two whole lessons (rather than the initial 30 minutes I had planned for!). When students are intrinsically motivated and engaged in their learning, I think it's really important to allow them that extra time for them to go deeper with the learning... so week 2 turned into week 3! 

Students presented their ideas for the problem they would like to solve for the Futurists' Fair. We had two teachers and the rest of the class acting as a "shark tank panel" to provide feedback on their presentation skills. Students then voted for two ideas (their own and one other!). They tallied up the results and found that pollution scraped in as the winner by 3 points! A small group of students then worked on creating a video for our class to present at the Futurists' Fair.