Yesterday we celebrated Global Maker day. We connected to schools all around Australia and the world for a design challenge. Our brief was that we had to create chairs for one of our characters - Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear or Goldilocks based on their needs. For example, Goldilocks is training for the Olympics, so she needs a comfy chair that she can relax in.
First, we got into groups of 3 and chose which person we would make a chair for. We made a plan of what we would make on a piece of paper. Then we prototyped it with cardboard. This was our original prototype. The groups had to bend and cut the cardboard to create their chair. This proved a bit of a challenge for many groups. There were many different styles in the room with some groups creating folding chairs and others creating desk chairs with one leg. This was most likely the most challenging stage of chair creation.
Then play-doh. At the beginning of this stage, everyone yelled “YAY! PLAY-DOH!!!” It certainly was a fun stage for many groups.
The fourth and final stage was creating our chairs out of pipe-cleaners, straws, toothpicks and tape. This stage was extremely messy, with straw bits, snapped toothpicks, pieces of pipe-cleaner and many other things littering the floor.
In each stage, we would have to work as a team and come up with ideas and what we needed to change from the last prototype. Then we would share our creations with the other schools.
We learnt from this that there are stages of design and prototyping we had to go through before could even make a real chair for our character and how this can relate to real life. At our school, there is a construction being built. It is an underground carpark and a Stage 3 learning centre. The teachers and principal thought about making this 3 years ago. They all came up with ideas and gave them to an architect. Then the architect went back and forth to teachers and parents for 3 years until they finally had their final prototype and only this year the have started to build.
The design challenge for Global Maker Day was certainly a highlight of our learning this year.
By Abby & Josie