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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613746370 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Inventing Toys
Kids Having Fun Learning Science
By Ed Sobey
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2002 Ed SobeyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-637-0
CHAPTER 1
Inventing and Learning
What is Inventing?
Inventing is the process of creating a new device or material, or a new variety of plant or animal. Although most people associate inventing with coming up with new ideas, ideas in themselves are not inventions. Inventing is really about making new things.
Until the inventor can prove a device works or a material can be made, it's not an invention. Most ideas for new products fail because no one takes them far enough to build a working model. Everyone has ideas, but only a few people take action on their ideas. Those who do, we label inventors.
The process of transforming the idea or the design into a working model is where the hard work of inventing (or creating) lies. Edison said that inventing is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The hard work occurs as inventors encounter and solve problems no one can anticipate.
As inventors transform ideas into working models, learning occurs. Inventors have to learn how to use tools, materials, and processes that may be new to them. They have to do things that they have never done — and possibly no one else has. This requires experimentation: designing, building, conducting tests, collecting and interpreting data, and making changes — hopefully improvements — to their inventions.
Faced with limits imposed by nature and technology, inventors develop an understanding of science and engineering principles, and by necessity they are also exposed to marketing and business planning principles. Inventors, like scientists, writers, and artists, are lifelong learners. They learn because they need to learn to keep inventing — learning empowers them to do what they enjoy doing. This observation applies to education as well. By creating environments in which students become inventors, we help them to be more enthusiastic learners.
Learning and Enjoyment
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago has studied inventors and other creative people. His research started with trying to understand why people enjoy some activities. In his book Flow — The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he lays out the handful of conditions that make a task or activity enjoyable:
1. The task, although possibly difficult to accomplish, is doable.
2. It is possible to concentrate on the task. Distractions can be eliminated.
3. The task has clear goals.
4. There is immediate feedback on progress.
5. The task consumes one's consciousness.
6. The worker has a sense of control over what he or she is doing.
7. Time passes quickly; one loses a sense of time.
Inventing and inventing to learn meet these conditions. Changing the learning process from a traditional flow of information to a challenging and thought-provoking activity where each learner injects his or her own creativity to help determine the outcome assures that the experience will be more enjoyable and learners will spend more time and effort on the learning tasks.
Inventing is not unique among creative pursuits in its association with learning and enjoyment. However, it is ideal for helping young students to learn science and technology as well as other subjects that can be woven into science projects.
Benefits of Using Inventing to Promote Learning
There are two main benefits of using inventing as a pedagogic tool to enhance learning. First, inventing makes kids think. We know that students aren't just empty 2-liter bottles waiting to be filled with the great information we want to pour in. To get them to learn, we need them to make mental connections — we can't do that for them. To make mental connections they must think, and inventing forces this to happen.
Like all inventors, they will think because they encounter challenges they need to solve in order to make their inventions work. When students become inventors they thirst for the information and skills that will help them improve their inventions. As a matter of course, they will encounter and learn physics, investigative techniques, and engineering principles.
The second benefit is that students will eagerly spend time on the task. It is generally agreed that the longer students spend actively working and thinking about something, the more they will learn. Inventing gets kids to spend longer on tasks because the activity is fun (it matches the conditions found by Csikszentmihalyi) and because they are working on their own creations. They have ownership and responsibility for the completed project, and they learn enthusiastically.
Inventing has additional learning benefits as well. Among other things, it helps students to learn the skills most sought by employers: working cooperatively with others, solving problems, using materials and time wisely, acquiring and using information, and using tools (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). Thus, inventing not only helps students to learn science content and research skills, it also helps prepare them for employment.
Inventing versus Other Inquiry-Based Learning Approaches
How is inventing to learn different? In some inquiry-based learning, it is the author's or the teacher's questions that are investigated, not the student's. For example, in most lab experiences, students don't control the process, they follow the cookbook. There is one correct answer and, frankly, most kids don't care what it is — they just need an answer to write on their lab handouts. In such situations, creativity is rarely encouraged.
With inventing to learn, we give students the goals and general parameters of an activity, and then leave it up to them to figure out how to meet those goals through the process of creating and improving their own inventions. Instead of stifling their creativity because it interferes with the lesson plan, we encourage it.
Creativity is an extremely strong force — creative people will tell you that they complete their projects because they are driven to see them finished. If they need to learn a new skill or acquire new knowledge in order to finish, they will do so. Letting your students be creative in a directed way will unleash this powerful force to help them learn.
Building a class of creative learners does require giving them support when they try something new. They need to be able to experiment without fear of failure or ridicule. But the rewards are great: the more self-confident they become, the more creative they become, and the more creative they become, the more responsible they will be for their own learning.
Structuring the Experience
Getting Students Involved
From the moment students enter the classroom for an inventing workshop they should be engaged in the process of inventing to learn. Have a simple preworkshop warm-up activity ready, one that you can describe in a few words. The goals should be clear and the materials close at hand. Have students work in teams of two or three so everyone participates. Here are a few suggestions:
• Straw structures. Teams construct a tower as tall as possible using only straws and masking tape. Measure completed structures with a yardstick or meter stick.
• Straw bridges. Teams build a bridge to span the space between two adjacent tables, and see how much weight the bridge can hold. (Use some common material for weight, like a chalkboard eraser.)
• Straw accessories. Teams pick an action figure or doll and build an accessory that could be sold along with that toy.
• Paper airplanes. Teams make paper airplanes that fly into a narrow target (such as a Hula-Hoop® or open trash bag) from across the room.
• New sandbox toy. Teams design on paper a new toy that preschoolers could use in a sandbox or at the beach. If the requisite materials are available, have them build a model.
As teams work, wander around asking what they are doing and making positive comments on their designs and their progress. Show off creative designs to everyone to inspire their creativity.
At the outset or at an appropriate point in the activity, it is a good idea to announce difficult time limits for completion. This will establish a precedent for inventing workshops to come. Although every team won't be able to complete their project to the degree that they want, it's important for students to learn that during the learning stage of the inventing process it is not necessarily appropriate to perfect a design. Point out that inventors have to work quickly and "make mistakes as fast as possible" so they can learn.
Conclude the activity by having each team hold up their design solution and describe it. You can point out interesting features and compliment each team on some aspect of their work. Lead the class in applause for each team after they have finished presenting their ideas.
Now you have set the tenor for the day. You have emphasized that time is in critically short supply, that it is okay to make mistakes, that people have to work in teams and cooperate, and that we value the ideas of other people. You also have demonstrated that you expect each team to be accountable for its work and that each will show what they accomplished at the end of an activity.
Issuing a Challenge
In an inventing workshop, the best way to lay out what you want students to do is to present it as a challenge. By issuing a challenge you establish that the students will take responsibility for the inventing and that they will have freedom to design and produce solutions of their own choosing. You also establish what the criteria are for evaluating success so everyone is aiming for the same target and can self-evaluate their progress.
Students will rise to the challenge provided that it sounds like fun and is something they think they can accomplish. Since people think of toys as being fun and since everyone has some expertise using them, toys are an ideal medium for physical inquiry.
When you issue the challenge, include a measurable goal. This focuses the activity and also makes it more enjoyable: shooting a squirt gun without a target quickly becomes boring, but when you add a target, especially a moving target, the exercise becomes much more fun.
The best goals are ones that require students to measure their success, record and graph the data, and interpret the results. Activities that meet these criteria help students learn not only the content, but also the processes of science.
Goals also encourage students to improve their inventions and learn as they do. Teams use numerical evaluations of goals as scores, and they want to improve their scores each time. Being able to measure their own progress — immediate feedback — means they are free to work on their own.
Allowing Students to Work Freely
Letting the inventors pick their own way to meet the challenge is how ownership of the responsibility transfers from you to them. If you tell them how to solve the problem, any lack of success is your problem: "You told us to do it this way and it didn't work."
However, many students will need help getting started — ask students to invent a toy and they are likely to give you blank stares in return. Showing them a model will jump-start their creative process and launch them into the activity. A proven model will speed things up by preventing mistakes that don't contribute to the desired learning. However, once they have mastered the basic design, encourage students to be creative with additions, deletions, and other changes.
For example, students building pneumatic-blast rockets could spend countless unproductive hours trying to figure out how to make a rocket made of paper fly across a gym. By showing them how to make the fuselage of the rocket you speed up the process and let them focus on the more interesting aspects of controlling the flight with fins, nose cones, and weights.
Once started, teams and individuals need to have the freedom to fail. This is essential to the creative process, as mistakes are often more helpful to the learning process than successes are. It is therefore important not to stifle any ideas as long as they are serious. Don't allow students to ridicule creative disasters. Extol the ideas and talk about why the design didn't work. Congratulate the team for their creativity and industry, and analyze the design for its strengths and limitations.
Resist the temptation to give explicit directions. Some students will find the transition from following directions to thinking for themselves to be difficult. You can help them by asking questions that lead them to new insights. Letting students address problems with their ideas, even if you can see that they won't work, is essential to the inventing (and learning) process.
While students are working on mock-ups and encountering problems you can help them to understand the underlying science. Ask questions and demand thoughtful responses before allowing them to continue building. Drawing analogies to experiences they have had will help them form mental connections. Prepare yourself by reviewing the Science Concepts section and Teachable Moments notes of each activity beforehand.
Raising the Stakes
After students have accepted the challenge and attained some degree of success, the next step is to raise the stakes. Many students will announce that they've made their toy and it works, so they're done. From a learning perspective they've just started when they've made their first model. Your objective is to get them to refocus on the challenge and make improvements to their toy.
Students are used to doing a project once and moving on to the next assignment. However, inventing takes the opposite approach. Inventors know that the first time they craft a solution it won't be the final one; it may not even be close. The most learning occurs when students test their ideas, find them to be inadequate, and figure out what to do to make their inventions better.
Using a yardstick or meter stick to measure progress towards a defined goal is an excellent way to encourage improvement. A team's car run of 10 feet may be okay until someone else's car goes 15 feet. Measuring results gives both data to analyze and inspiration to other teams. Post the results where everyone can take a look at them. (Although the intent is not to turn the inventing process into a competition, it will fire up the competitive spirit and result in students expending more effort.)
Students will sometimes need constructive criticism in order to improve their designs. One method of providing this is as follows. First, initiate a dialogue by pointing out the positive aspects of the model or the team's work ethic. (For some projects you may need to use considerable imagination, but make sure you start with a positive.) Then ask about the most obvious limitation of the work, being careful to keep the remarks impersonal. When team members agree that their work has one or more limitations, you can then proceed to raise ideas to overcome the limitation. Ask if they have any themselves. Most teams will have a few, which allows you to help them select one or more to pursue. If they don't have any ideas, you may ask if they would like to hear some of yours, but they should have the option of declining. The onus will be back on them to figure out a solution; check back with them a little later to see if they are making progress. This process of providing critical feedback, then, has three phases: positive comments, raising questions about limitations, and raising ideas to overcome the limitations. Although time-consuming, it is an approach that builds, rather than destroys, self-confidence.
Connecting the Learning
One reason that toy inventing workshops are such rich learning experiences is that they present many opportunities for students to utilize multiple intelligences. Obviously, individuals who are strong logical-mathematical learners will do well in this type of setting, but students who are stronger in other intelligences — especially the visual-spatial, interpersonal, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and naturalist intelligences — will also be able to put their own particular abilities to good use. As you plan and conduct a workshop, look for opportunities to accommodate all of the students in your class. For example, you may wish to take multiple intelligences into consideration when you pair students up in teams, or when you choose follow-up activities. (For more on multiple intelligences, see Howard Gardner's description in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, as well as the extensive body of later material on the subject.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inventing Toys by Ed Sobey. Copyright © 2002 Ed Sobey. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,How to Use This Book,
Part I: Inventing to Learn,
Inventing and Learning,
Structuring the Experience,
Part II: Workshops,
Workshop 1: Reverse Engineering,
Workshop 2: Toy Cars,
Workshop 3: Toy Boats,
Workshop 4: Pneumatic-Blast Rockets,
Workshop 5: Toy Planes,
Workshop 6: Electric Fans,
Part III: Additional Activities and Resources,
Workshop 1 Adapted for Use with Push 'n Go Cars,
Five Additional Toy Inventing Activity (Outlines),
Resources,
Appendix (Answers to Puzzles),
Index,