This lesson aims to introduce students at the top of the K-12 ladder to the concept of Design Thinking via Common Core Literacy Standards recently introduced

This lesson aims to introduce students at the top of the K-12 ladder to the concept of Design Thinking via Common Core Literacy Standards recently introduced

How do we prepare K-12 students and learning communities to be as successful as possible? If future jobs require creativity, problem-solving, and communication, how do we teach these skills in meaningful ways? How do we bring together passionate school leaders to create systemic solutions to educational challenges? Come explore these questions and more in Design Thinking for Leading and Learning.
The course is organized into three sections that combine design thinking content with real-world education examples, as well as opportunities for learners to apply concepts in their own setting.
This course is part of the Open Learning Library, which is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll in the course if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.

In courses and programs with community-sponsored or industry-sponsored projects, the handoff between the design team and the sponsoring partner is a particularly vulnerable transition. Innovations with the potential for impact fail shortly after the handoff for myriad reasons, including: inadequate resource allocation (time, money, skills); no clear institutional champion; inadequate institutional will to see the concept through further trial, iteration, and growth; and more. What might it look like to design the handoff? This lesson prompts design students (high school through graduate school) to begin a design project within a design project: to empathize with the handoff’s stakeholders; to define the handoff’s key needs and opportunities; to ideate novel handoff artifacts, strategies, and processes; to prototype improvements to their intended handoff strategy; and to test these strategies before the class or program ends so they can make adjustments and improvements.

The “Einstein Project” is a framework that is designed to help you find a solution to an everyday problem that makes you passionate in your thinking and designing. This project is designed to make you think outside of the box as active learners and create solutions in uncommon ways, forget about failing or succeeding and take chances.

SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students conduct research on electric bicycles and electric cars, choose one of these technologies, and create a video promoting its use as a climate solution.

SCIENTIST NOTES: Over the course of their use, electric cars are far more environmentally friendly than conventional automobiles. This lesson examines those benefits as well as how to make cities friendlier to bikes and other commuting options. The external resources in this lesson have passed our scientific review process.

POSITIVES:
-Students must use hard data to promote either electric bicycles or electric cars.
-Students record quick, informative videos as their assessment in this lesson plan.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Students should have a basic understanding of climate change. They should know that burning fossil fuels creates greenhouse gases and that greenhouse gases are heating up the planet.
-There are fourteen total images in the Inquire section. Feel free to disregard some of them based on your needs.
-Many students assume that electric cars do not create emissions at all. Students will learn:
-There are embedded emissions from the manufacturing of electric cars.
-Electric cars that use electricity generated by fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) are still creating emissions.
-Your students will need access to devices to record their advertisements. Students can record themselves on iPods, iPads, laptops, or other school devices. Depending on your school's phone policy, you can have your students use their own devices.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Be sensitive to the socioeconomic situation of your students. Some students' families may not own bicycles or cars or be able to afford electric bicycles or electric cars.
-Creating the advertisement can be done as a homework assignment.
-Students may want to include drawings, puppets, props, or other creative items in their advertisements. Encourage their creative expression!

This site presents challenges faced by NASA engineers who are developing the next generation of aerospace vehicles. The challenges: thermal protection systems, spacecraft structures, electrodynamic propulsion systems, propellers, and personal satellite assistants. Students design, build, test, re-design, and re-build models that meet specified design criteria, using the same analytical skills as engineers.

Learn to produce great designs, be a more effective engineer, and communicate with high emotional and intellectual impact. This project based course gives students the ability to understand, contextualize, and analyze engineering designs and systems. By learning and applying design thinking, students will more effectively solve problems in any domain. Lectures focus on teaching a tested, iterative design process as well as techniques to sharpen creative analysis. Guest lectures from all disciplines illustrate different approaches to design thinking. This course develops students' skills to conceive, organize, lead, implement, and evaluate successful projects in any engineering discipline. Additionally, students learn how to give compelling in-person presentations. Open to all majors, all years.

In this lesson, students will learn what erosion is and how human actions influence erosion. Includes introduction, demonstration instructions, and questions for wrap-up discussion.

NGSS: 2-ESS2-1

Time: 50 minutes

Materials: plastic containers with sand and gravel, sponges, and plastic cups

In the Future of Electric Transportation Design Challenge - a soup-to-nuts curriculum toolkit from Construct - you'll ask young people to find new and novel ways to increase use & equitable access to electric vehicles. This comprehensive toolkit is intended for classroom teachers and other educators interested in running a multi-week or full-term design challenge with students.

The guide is written with 8th-9th graders as a target grade level, however this curriculum could easily be adapted for both older and younger students: 5th-12th grade. An optional feature in this challenge experience is to have students submit their design briefs (anonymously from their teacher) for the opportunity to be recognized by Construct and Industry Leaders interested in their concepts! A teacher running this Transportation Design Challenge could connect it to multiple standards at multiple grade-levels in multiple subject areas. Construct has facilitated several cohort-based challenges for middle and high school students, using this toolkit, and we are excited to be able to provide this curriculum at no charge to any interested teachers.

We are happy to answer any questions - you can reach us at info@constructlearns.org. We also offer additional coaching support. Please download this Challenge and share it with your colleagues! If you opt to run the Challenge in your classroom, we do hope you'll reach back and let us know how it worked for YOU! With your feedback, we'll keep iterating and improving and work to make this a user-friendly, joy-provoking, flexible, rigorous, effective, skills-building and FUN curriculum toolkit for you and your students.

SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students explore the role of video games in bringing awareness to climate change and explore the tensions and purposes of video games as they relate to climate change.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson challenges students to think about how video games can be utilized to teach others about climate change. Students walk through this lesson by first critically thinking about what makes video games fun and entertaining, followed by reading an article and discussion centered around how gaming can educate people on climate change, and finally options at the end to create their own game about climate change. The lesson includes an op-ed article written by an author who writes about many things including sustainability. This is a great lesson for teaching alternative methods to educating the public about climate change.

POSITIVES:
-This lesson can be used in computer science, environmental science, physics, and engineering classes.
-Students are given voice and choice in this lesson.
-Students connect to an activity many already engage in to rediscover new purposes.
-Teachers have several differentiated options depending on skill, interest, and experience.
-This can be self-directed or teacher-guided and can be drawn out or built upon as the starting point of a larger unit on game design or elements of computer-based game design.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Students should have a basic understanding of climate change and its different effects.
-Students should have an awareness of basic game design categories.
-Teachers should be clear on which computer programs and platforms the school has access to for coding and game design.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Depending on various coding or computer skill levels, teachers can adjust for different degrees of difficulty and ability. For an introduction class or for students who have little experience with computers or coding, the Inspire activity can be completed and mapped out on paper.
-Teachers can adjust the Inspire section to target specific computer science or coding skills or to focus on aspects such as design, evaluation, music, visuals, decisions, and rewards.
-Students can work independently or in small groups with varied purposes. For example, the whole class can design a game and together come up with the goal and purpose. Smaller groups can be formed to design different elements of the game.
-Teachers can decide to offer one or both options in the Inspire section. Teachers can also choose to focus only on evaluating current climate change video or mobile games, dividing the class into groups where each group evaluates 2-3 existing games.
-Students can use different programs or learning platforms depending on what different schools have.
-Students can present their findings or games to different audiences.

This video has 100 Prompts for your students or participants to come up with 100 different ideas. You should ask each student to grab a pen & paper (ideally post-its) and have a different piece of paper for each idea. This video can be used to kick-off the Ideation State of Design Thinking (or any Ideation Session), using Brainwriting. I have used for both in-person and live-online education at University College Dublin.

I usually use 10 prompts in class - get a student to pick a number between 1 and 9 inclusive and then use the Chapters below the video to play from that number (e.g. someone shouts out seven so I play from 71)

Brainwriting is a solo exercise - write down all your ideas and THEN share with others before coming up with even more ideas. Research shows that this hybrid-approach (of generating ideas alone first, and then sharing with a team) works best. "Groups organized in the hybrid structure are able to generate more ideas, to generate better ideas, and to better discern the quality of the ideas they generate" (Girotra et al, 2010)

This is a STEM unit that can be used in conjunction with ITEEA EbD TEEMS Grade 2 Our Environment, Our Health Unit. Teachers might want to use this STEM Unit with environmental units and Earth Day. Students learn about their positive and negative impact on their environment. Students learn that they can have a positive impact on their environment when they use the 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Redesign process.

Young students seem fascinated by how their bodies work. This unit serves as an introduction for young students to begin their fundamental understanding of human biology.

The focus in this six-week curriculum unit is for primary-grade scientists to build some conceptual knowledge of the human skeletal system. The use of inquiry allows students at all levels to learn in an inherently differentiated environment, learning new concepts and experiencing laboratory experiments and classroom demonstrations throughout this unit on how our skeleton helps us.

The learning begins with the primary mentor texts, the picture book, The Skeleton Inside You by Philip Balestrino and Bones by Stephen Krensky. Classroom activities include creating models of bones, viewing x-rays, brainstorming design solutions for damaged or missing bones, measuring bones and determining structure features and taking a field trip to the local museum to view and draw skeletons. Students will maintain a science journal throughout the unit.

We want to develop citizens who are knowledgeable problem-solvers as they tackle the challenges of improving the quality of life for themselves and the world around them. One approach that has been heavily utilized in universities and businesses in recent times is known as Design Thinking. It is a model adopted by famous companies such as Google, Apple and Airbnb and they have wielded it to notable effect. The design thinking model is an incredibly powerful and useful process for students to use whenever they are faced with designing solutions to help others. Like any process or skill, it will take practice to become good at it.

While the heart of this unit is the Design Thinking process, I have also connected it to life science concepts related to the human body as outlined in both NGSS and Connecticut State Standards. The unit should take nine or ten 45 minute lessons to complete, depending on the complexity of the projects to be prototyped and tested.

Participants collaborate in ISKME's OER Design Lab at Maker Faire to brainstorm, prototype, and present new ideas for teaching and learning. Each participant creates an Open Educational Resource (OER) that will be shared on OER Commons and with teachers during the Maker Faire follow up Teachers as Makers Academy.

Maker Faire participants collaborate in ISKME's Design Lab, using digital stories and salvaged materials to design an innovative school of the future. The Design Lab features Makers Mauro ffortisimo Di Nucci's deconstructed piano and INKA Biospheric Systems' Vertical Garden; as well as Student and Teacher project examples that integrate art, science, sustainability, and green design inspire the creation of shareable open-source learning resources. This wiki page showcases photos and video from the Design Lab, open educational resources for teachers, and a step by step guide through the design process.

ISKME's OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative offers teachers a collaborative professional development model centered on engagement with Open Educational Resources (OER). The OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a global imperative. Open Educational Resources, or OER, offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes and effective technologies to engage with learning for all.

Activities, resources, photos and videos from ISKME's two day professional development teacher training that explores Open Educational Resources (OER) and Maker-Teacher collaborations to facilitate innovation in the classroom. The Makers’ projects are points of inspiration for Teachers while they engage in design-thinking activities to create, remix, and share OER Projects with online collaborative tools.

ISKME's Use Case Design Lab from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s OER Grantees Meeting, April 22nd, 2014 - April 24th, 2014: OER Value Proposition and Evidence of Impact in 2014
http://iskme.org/events/oer-grantee-meeting-2014