Creating Learning Opportunities That Challenge Students to Use a Design Process to Innovate and Solve Problems

This week's learning was all about creating learning opportunities that challenge students to use a design process to innovate and solve problems. 

A.J Juliani & John Spencer wrote the book, LAUNCH: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out the Maker in Every Student, which is the book I have been using to help guide our learning for the different ISTE learning objectives we are focusing on for this learning team. These two authors created this design process as a way to help others integrate design thinking into everyday learning that takes place in the classroom. The LAUNCH Cycle was the perfect way to get us thinking about the week's design process learning objective!

To begin our learning for the day, we spent time reading about the LAUNCH Cycle. Next, we used a collaborative Google Doc to share our thoughts to the following questions, then held a live group discussion. 

Next, after reviewing the phases of the LAUNCH Cycle together, participants were presented with two challenge options to choose from.  

 

Participants formed their teams, then used some resources I put together for them to use while they worked their way through the LAUNCH Cycle phases and completed their challenge. 

Both teams did a fantastic job with their designs! 

When the designs were complete for the day, we took some time to reflect on the design process they used. There are several questions that came up in their reflections. It will be fun to address these questions together next week! 

I learned several things from going through this learning activity from the facilitator perspective. I learned how important it is to have question stems ready to go for the different phases of the LAUNCH cycle, for both students and the facilitator. I also learned that I need to spend more time finding ideas to help make the different phases easier to formatively assess and provide feedback. If I was using this process with a particular learning goal in mind (such as a writing, research, or content standard) I would definitely need some resources to help my students focus on that particular learning goal. For this upcoming week, I am going to spend some time helping teachers think through examples of how this design process can be used in their own classroom.